How to audit your data to improve fundraising efforts

Good data hygiene is the key to fundraising success for nonprofit organizations. It means you can run accurate reports. You can make sound decisions about where to concentrate your fundraising efforts. And, you can keep your supporters well-informed. That’s why it’s so important to audit your fundraising data and regularly invest time into maintaining good data hygiene. Not convinced?

Consider the following scenarios:

• • A member of your development committee asks you to send a list of donors to your most recent year-end appeal. When you create the report, you realize several donors are missing. It turns out their gifts weren’t coded to the appeal.
  • A grant application asks you to provide the percentage of board members who made financial gifts to your organization in the prior fiscal year. When you search for your board members, you realize there are two different groups, one called Board and one called Board Members. Neither one is up to date with current board members.
  • You need to decide where to focus your fundraising efforts in the new year, but you’re not sure which past efforts were most successful and are worthy of repeating.

These issues all tie back to data hygiene.

When your organization is struggling with poor data hygiene, you can’t run reliable reports. You can’t know for sure which fundraising efforts resulted in a gift. You miss out on key insights that could help you more effectively steward your donors.

If you’re an LGL customer who’d like to get started conducting an audit of your fundraising data, check out this webinar featuring Felicia Terry, principal specialist of Nonprofit Software Specialists and a member of the LGL Consultant Network. She’ll give you an introduction to how you can audit your usage of Little Green Light, as well as how to use LGL’s functionality to resolve issues and maintain good data hygiene going forward.

Conclusion

The thought of cleaning up the data in your LGL database can be daunting, but we believe it is well worth the effort. In this webinar featuring Felicia Terry, you’ll learn some clear, manageable steps to assess your existing data and help you develop a strategy to maintain it going forward. Get more tips from the LGL Consultant Network in this article: 8 tips to maximize the power of your donor database.