Take charge of your data to meet fundraising goals

At the 2013 AFP-NNE Annual Conference held in Portland, Maine, Chris Bicknell of Little Green Light, Kathy Howrigan of Marts & Lundy, and Brendan Kinney of Vermont Public Radio (and the moderator of #fundchat) gave a presentation titled, “Take Charge of Your Data to Meet Fundraising Goals.”

This presentation provides basic tips and ideas for how to tackle data challenges and, in turn, boost your fundraising efforts. Here is what you’ll learn from the presentation slides below:

• Understand challenges shared by nonprofits around the country.
• Focus on establishing a more strategic approach to donor data management.
• Learn practical ways to overcome those challenges.
• Take away some simple tools.
• Ultimately, the goal is to help your organization raise more philanthropy for your important mission.

A key component of the presentation is the results of a survey conducted to prepare for this conversation. In all, 69 people from a range of nonprofit organizations, participated in the survey. The results reveal the top challenges that nonprofit organizations face with their data. The presentation takes each challenge one-by-one and provides real-world tactics for how to overcome these challenges and hopefully results in enhancing the impact that your nonprofit can have in carrying out its mission.

Something we found particularly distressing was the significant percentage of nonprofits who a) had increased or improved communication with constituents as a top element in their strategic plan while at the same time had b) little to no mention of any strategy to improve the data/systems needs required to succeed in that objective. This is not a blanket pitch to spend more money on data/systems, instead it seems that many miss the clear link between communication strategy and data/systems strategy. Bad phone numbers, missing emails and incorrect addresses put a rapid stop to increased communications efforts.

http://www.slideshare.net/fundchat/afp-nne-combined-slides