Database Health & Maintenance Archives

Overcome these top 10 fundraising database issues, and you are on your way to data health and integrity!

Your fundraising database should be the hub — the destination — for everyone in your department. To achieve this, your fundraising database must be clean, tidy, logical, and friendly. For every working person on the planet, when they start their day, they open up their email to check in on what is happening. The perfect…

How My Dread of Walking into Work Changed My Life and Helped Me Build A Clean Database Empire

I laid in bed. It was 6am. And I really didn’t want to move…I knew that walking into work meant walking into an inherited fundraising database riddled with duplicate records, bad gift coding, and missing data….and people would want lists and reports.

Database Health: Gift Entry and Pledge Management

We’ve all heard the saying about our fundraising database….”junk in, junk out.” That’s why putting some rigor around gift entry and pledge management can help lift all fundraising boats. With accurate data in the system your development team can accomplish a lot including: properly steward donors for their gifts, identify prospects, acknowledge donors in a timely…

Tracking Constituents in Your Fundraising Database (Part 4 of 4)

Our fourth and final blog in this series is about constituent tracking and management. This is where the rubber hits the road. If you can’t track your constituents, how to communicate with them, the relationships they have, and historical information with your organization, you can’t cultivate, solicit, or steward in a sophisticated way. Here are what we recommend…

Database Utilization (Part 3 of 4)

Using Your Database to Its Fullest Extent There are many development shops out there that invest in a big, beautiful database – the “Cadillac” of databases, if you will. But most shops we work with don’t utilize the database to its fullest extent. In fact, it typically serves as just a repository for gift information…