3 Nonprofit Donor Database Best Practices For Your Organization

Your donor database tells the story of your nonprofit’s successes and failures. When donor data isn’t properly collected and understood, chances are that your organization will operate haphazardly, without insight into how to cultivate your donors and drive your mission forward.

Nonprofit data can help you optimize your online fundraising, social media marketing, donor management, and other aspects of your organization. Good donor data helps you optimize your donor lifecycle and polish your donor journey.

In this article, we’ll share three donor database best practices to help you collect, track, and use your valuable donor information to understand your donors better and increase your funds.

• Get Your Team On The Same Page
• Look To Your Nonprofit Database For Strategic Decision-Making
• Focus On The Most Relevant Donor Data

1. Get Your Team On The Same Page

Create a system for data-entry and make sure everyone who has access to your database follows it, even your board members and volunteers. Donor management systems with the ability to integrate can do the work of collecting and storing your data from other nonprofit software that you use, but that’s only half the battle. Staying organized and entering data correctly is the only sure way that you’ll always be able to pull the information you need from your donor database.

2. Look To Your Nonprofit Database For Strategic Decision-Making

Start retraining the way your whole team thinks about data. Put it at the heart of your work, and start using the rich insights from your nonprofit database to drive your strategy and decision-making. Need to improve your email marketing reach? Start tracking the open and click-thru rates of your emails and look for patterns that will help you improve.

Online fundraising campaigns not getting the return you want? Sync them up with your online donation pages and monitor how people are interacting with them. Whatever the case, go to your data first and help everyone on your team understand the importance of your donor data. It’s easy and essential to your success.

3. Focus On The Most Relevant Donor Data

Collecting every piece of data from every source will likely cause you to get overwhelmed and want to give up. That’s why it’s important to focus on the most important data first. Ask yourself what your main goals are, and then choose the data points that will help you reach them. If you need to increase your event attendance, start tracking data related to each event’s promotion strategy and registration tracking. Focus on improving just one or two areas of data integration, and you’ll organically start learning best practices as you go.

If you want more practical steps on organizing your nonprofit database, check out our blog post on the 4 steps you need to take to organize your donor list.

How To Organize Your Donor List