Dig Into Your Donor Data

Welcome to Week 4! If you are starting from scratch with individual giving, without donor history, use your hour this week to check, clean up, and add to your database. If you have conducted sales-related fundraising and collected cash without creating donor records, use your hour this week to gather contact information on your top sellers and other stakeholders, and invite them to a meeting in about a month. The Week 7* blog post will share an agenda you can use, with prompts for helping people identify prospects you could add to your list. In the meantime, use Week 3’s model for a spreadsheet and begin adding people from your own personal contacts.

Cast a wide net! Remember that you are going to be communicating with these folks for a while before asking them for money, so the criteria can be broader than “people who would give a gift today.”

For those folks with donor records from 2019, let’s dig into the data. If you have two or three years of history, that’s excellent – once you have three years of history, you can see how results are trending. Use what you have to find your three critical baselines. Answer these questions for 2019, and if you have earlier data, for 2018 and 2017 if you can:

Are the numbers steady from year to year? Is there a steady trend, for better or worse, in one or more baselines?

If you’re trending upward, that’s fantastic – you already have momentum! Use this year to build on it.

If the numbers are flat, you have a strong and solid base. Your primary opportunity this year will be to find more people who are similar to your current supporters, and bring them into the fold.

If your numbers are trending down, or jumping around, you’re in the right place to start taking control. This is your year to organize an airtight system you can count on to regain and retain donors. More on past donor recapture in a future post.

Let’s see if you have some extra-devoted people: for each year, divide the number of gifts by the number of donors to determine if you have some multi-gift annual donors. If you can identify the people who give to you more than once in a year, consider these two points, which may feel a bit contradictory:

1. These are the people who care the most about your mission. They want to respond to you. Giving makes them feel good and they want that feeling more than once a year. Protect these valuable individuals from the threat of donor fatigue by investing in those relationships outside of the gift transaction. Pay personal attention – whether that’s you or a partner you enlist.

2. If a donor gives you $50 three times in a year, do not assume that giving $150 once will feel comfortable for them. Speaking from my professional experience, trying to streamline giving into one larger gift to reduce the number of solicitations is a fool’s errand.

Please post questions in the comments, as well as anything interesting you discover by digging in to your numbers. And yes, we’ll talk about the costs of raising those dollars in a later post. For now, stay focused on your topline results, and have a great week!

Your Prospect Database

Welcome to Week 3! Last week you found your data, which might be in more than one format. Your precious hour this week is dedicated to assessing your data situation. If you have everything in a spreadsheet or database already, skip to Section B.

A: You Have Hard Copy and/or Multiple Data Sources

This is an important project and you’re ready to ask for your first gift of the year – not money, but work. If you have donor and prospect information on paper, and/or in two or more places, such as Excel or exported email contacts from one or several people, use your hour to reach out for some volunteer data entry help to put everything in one place. When you’re dealing with dozens or hundreds of records, you can get started quickly using Google Sheets to capture everything, since multiple people can easily contribute to the effort, and then downloading the material into Excel to take advantage of its powerful capacity.

What information goes into a startup database? Consider how you might use those records to save work later; what fields do you want to be sure to capture? Here are suggested headers with comments in the numbered footnotes:

Relationship (1)

Title

First Name

Middle Name or Initial

Salutation (2)

Suffix

Organization Name (3)

Address Line 1

Address Line 2

City

State

ZIP (4)

Email Address

Telephone Number

Record Status (5)

2019 Gift Date

2019 Gift Amount

2019 Appeal (6)

Add columns for the last three gift fields again, labeled for 2020 to track your achievements this year. If people are giving to your organization more than once you can have more sets of those three columns per year, marking them Gift 1, Gift 2, etc. – and if you’re there now, it’s time to consider a real donor database or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system! But to hit the ground running, get help with the data entry, get everything into Excel, and prepare to proofread the data for accuracy and consistency. Spelling people’s names correctly and knowing their proper title shows that you respect them.

1 – Track the main reason this individual is linked to your organization. “Friend” is a catch-all category; you may have Board, Staff, Alumni (which might mean former program participant, former student, former staff – whatever makes sense to you), Parent, Member – the categories will be specific to your type of organization.

2 – Salutation is the field you use in a personal greeting email or letter, so if the first name is Kathleen and you call her Kate, this is where you put that informal name. Timesaver: leave this column blank until you’re finished entering data. Copy the First Name column contents into this field and only change when needed.

3 – If it is to appear in the address. Skip if it’s not relevant.

4 – Remember that Excel has a format for ZIP codes that permits the leading zero for NJ and New England states.

5 – Record Status allows you to track whether that record is current. If you don’t have a current address, or there is another reason you don’t want to contact that person, you don’t want to delete useful history. Use codes like Active, Bad Address, Do Not Mail, Deceased so you can filter your list when it’s time to send mail or email.

6 – Appeal is what prompted the gift: Personal Ask, Unsolicited, Year-End Letter, etc.

B: Single Digital Source for Data

If you have a digital donor database already, that’s fantastic! Use your hour to check for consistent and accurate entry. Here are some suggestions around formatting the fields that will make your life easier:

If you have names but not salutations, add that field; copy First Name contents into the Salutation field and change as needed for nickames.

If your name field has the data as a string, e.g. “Chris T. Miller” in a single cell, use Excel’s Text to Columns function to split those into distinct fields. This will help the data to stay organized as you grow.

Review/refresh what you have in, or add, a Relationship field. Some programs call it Constituency or another term – whatever you prefer to call it, you want to be sure that you are capturing the primary connection between this person and your organization. This positions you for targeted messages that speak to individuals more personally.

Sort your data a few times using different fields to find duplicates and misspellings:

Sort by first name to uncover errors like a record for Chris Miller and one for Christine Miller – consolidate those.

Sort by last name, and again by Address 1, to find family members and consider whether they all need to be active records.

Sort by City to find misspellings and correct them. I can’t tell you how many ways I have seen “Philadelphia” spelled wrong by people who live here!

C. Weekly Goal

By the end of this week, you will be more intimately acquainted with your database, and its contents will be accurate, consistent, and ready to serve you. Engage volunteer help as needed since your time is limited. Next week: analyzing your data.

Database, Goals, & Compliance

Do you wish your nonprofit organization had more money coming in? Are you generating grant proposals but never seem to have time to raise charitable gifts from individuals? Stuck in the Catch-22 of not raising enough money to hire someone to raise money? If you’re willing to dedicate 60 minutes each week to launch or elevate your fundraising, welcome to Annual Giving in One Hour a Week! Here is your action plan for Week 2:

Annual Giving in One Hour a Week is a yearlong challenge divided into quarters that build on each other, and alternate between behind-the-scenes work and external relations. Every Monday you can grab a specific task that supports the theme for the current quarter.

 Quarter 1, January through March, is all about Database, Goals, & Compliance.

This week’s task is to frame out the first quarter of your year. Download the worksheet to capture your ideas, questions, and goals. This is a first step, so keep this document on hand and come back to it periodically to update it. If you make a folder for Annual Giving in One Hour a Week, you can easily find your worksheets and also have a place to save articles, lists, copy, and other resources.

Your organization is unique, so as you make your notes, capture factors that pertain to your particular situation. Write your responses in bullet points, diagrams, paragraphs, whatever works best to express yourself. This document is just for you.

The worksheet will help you to assess where you are now, and where you can be by this time next year. Identify your preliminary goal, which may change as you gather more information. Involve a partner or small group if you have that option, so you draw from multiple perspectives to shape your goal. Start by listing the information you need, where you can find that information, and the resources that you need to organize and analyze that information.

WEEK 2 WORKSHEET

Bonus task: it’s early in the year, so check on your state’s compliance requirements and status to make sure that your organization is ready to solicit when it’s time.

To frame out the rest of the year, the quarterly themes are:

Quarter 2, April through June: People Who Can Help You Succeed
Quarter 3, July through September: Create Your Campaign
Quarter 4, October through December: Raise Money – and Say Thank You

Post any questions in the comments, and you’re welcome to message me directly if you prefer. Have a great week!

For Week 1, you’ll need your calendar or planner, whatever you use to organize your schedule, and a little quiet time. It’s important that you feel like you can stay on top of completing the steps week to week, so the first task is to manage your own expectations of how much time you have.

Start by marking the weeks when you know you won’t be available. Vacations, professional development, crunch time at work, or volunteer work you love to do – embrace real life! Do you have 48 weeks to work on Annual Giving? Is it more like 45? Accept what your capacity is, be at peace with it, and here’s how we make it work: some Monday tasks will be classified as “Extra Credit” because, while they are valuable in moving you forward, they are not absolutely critical. Skip those when you’re not available and don’t worry about falling behind. When you have Monday holidays, check in here on Tuesdays so you can put the weekly task on your schedule.

You may want to schedule a weekly meeting with yourself to do this work. If your schedule varies a lot, or is prone to interruption, try finding 15- or 30-minute blocks throughout the week. Do what works for you. With all the hats you wear – as a professional or as a volunteer –your time is extremely limited and I want to help you to use it strategically to accomplish your fundraising goals. Commit to doing Annual Giving in One Hour a Week when you truly can work on it, and I’ll see you here on the 13th. Feel free to message me with questions or ideas, and have a great week!