Reflect, Refresh, and Reboot: A Nonprofit’s Guide to Success in 2019

A month into the new year and most resolutions have started to wane, but it’s not too late to establish guidelines for success at your organization. Use this time to reflect on past initiatives while rebooting your database with a simple data refresh. Follow these three steps to make 2019 the best year yet:

1. Reflect: Analyze Your Information

Put your data to good use. Use your database to help inform decisions in your 2019 strategy. Look at previous marketing initiatives including email campaigns and fundraising events. Note positive trends in past opportunities and strive to experiment with new ways to make a greater impact.

A key element to data management involves tracking and quantifying metrics. In order to properly analyze your information, your organization should monitor these main components:

• Marketing engagement: Track how many and what donors engaged with your marketing campaigns.
• Prospect profiles: Keep prospective and major donor data up-to-date. Make sure that your CRM system allows you to fully customize your donor profiles.
• Donation data: What was the average gift size? Donor retention for 2018? Month over month donor growth? Trends in online giving?

By examining defined metrics, your organization can build new campaign strategies that raise more money for your organization. In turn, it affords you the opportunity to create the most meaningful relationships with donors.

2. Refresh: Clean Up Your Database

Proper data hygiene can be immensely beneficial to your nonprofit organization. Clean data can help identify key metrics which are instrumental in making good fundraising decisions. Identify a standard for data collection at the point of entry or begin implementing tools that can bidirectionally import and export your data across every platform.

Complete these tasks to maintain data hygiene:

• Eliminate duplicates by aggregating, filtering, and merging
• Install and utilize a data backup system
• Educate your team on how to adhere to data hygiene standards
• Scan gifts to ensure that everything has been recorded properly
• Schedule continual audits across all of your systems throughout the year

Proper data hygiene will have long-term benefits and allow your organization to make informed business decisions. Having a hygienic database can be done with the right approach and an overall priority for data integrity.

3. Reboot: Optimize and Democratize Your Data

Data democratization allows nonprofits to be more agile; providing the distinct advantage of giving users the ability to understand and process data without assistance. With easily accessible data, the decision-making process is shortened, increasing the potential to discover new opportunities over time.

By integrating data from disparate sources into a single system of record (SoR), users can analyze accurate data more efficiently which helps build better relationships with donors and increase contributions. To yield maximum benefits from your database, your data must be actively managed.

Ways to maintain optimal data management:

• Get the entire organization on board
• Train members about data processing
• Avoid creating separate data silos
• Implement data standards
• Leverage data integration tools

With optimized data, tracking key analytics, and integrating your tools is easier than ever. Ultimately, a well-managed database that is equally accessible and continually optimized can be the single most important investment you can make in your organization’s growth and success for 2019.