With Fundraising Software, it Pays to be Exclusive in Data Entry

By Alan Sharpe, CFRE
The most valuable thing in direct mail fundraising isn’t your donors, but your donor data. Your building could burn down this afternoon, and all your staff could quit, and you’d still be able to recover if your donor data remained intact. But if you lose your donor data, you lose, period.

But your data is only useful if you can make sense of it. And many non-profit organizations can’t. For example, I regularly work charities who cannot quickly or easily tell me how many of their donors are individuals, how many are businesses and how many are government agencies. Or they can’t tell me (easily and quickly) how many of their individual donors are also volunteers, or how many of their service club donors have not made a gift in 12 months.

These charities are not exclusive enough in their data entry. They have a field in their fundraising software called “Donor Type” or “Record Type,” and they type into this field whatever they think best helps them identify the donor.

For example, in this Type field they might enter the following codes:

I = Individual
B = Business
S = Service Club
M = Board Member
T = Teacher
V = Volunteer

You can see the problem, can’t you? An individual might also be a board member. A teacher might also be a volunteer. A director of development will never be able to count how many individual donors the charity has by counting all the records flagged “I” in the Type field because these categories are not mutually exclusive. Teachers, board members and volunteers are all individuals.

The type field in your donor management system needs to meet two criteria.

1. It must be a “must enter” field. It must not be allowed to remain blank.

2. It must contain mutually exclusive categories, such as the following:

B = Business
C = Church
F = Foundation
G = Government
I = Individual
S = Service Club

If you want to add supplementary information to each record, create a non-mutually exclusive field. These fields often contain what are called Flags, Sort Codes and Promotion Codes. A Flag Code might contain the letter V for volunteer, or BM for board member.

Thus, a record for Jane Smith might have the letter I in the Type field (she is an individual, not a business or a church), and the letters AL, MD and BM in the Flags field, perhaps separated by commas (thus: AL, MD, BM), since Jane is also an Alumni, a Major Donor and a Board Member.

Good fundraising software lets you sort on any of these categories. You can find out how many Individuals are also Volunteers, for example. When your data entry practices are sound, you can define multiple relationships for each donor record. You have a wealth of possibilities at your fingertips, literally.

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