How to Maintain Your Donor Management System for Better Results

Is your donor management system slowing your team down instead of helping you raise more? Given that CRM for nonprofits represents a significant investment, it should play an integral part in your decision-making process. This comes at an especially high cost, as 63% of donors prefer to give online. Having a dependable system means your organization can make more strategic decisions to nurture these relationships and motivate greater giving. 

If your team is increasingly frustrated with the data quality or usability of your platform, you might start by making some minor adjustments to improve clarity. But if you’re constantly dealing with complications, roadblocks, and cumbersome workarounds, it could be a sign that you need to consider another solution.

The Importance of Donor Management Systems

Without a well-rounded donor management system, your organization risks missing opportunities to better engage supporters. For instance, imagine someone downloading multiple resources on a specific program and attending a webinar on the same topic. Without a system to track these interactions, you might miss the chance to send timely follow-up communications and nurture this supporter from interest to commitment. 

Having a reliable donor management system in place allows you to meticulously track and manage donor information, interactions, and engagement history. This holistic view ensures that each communication is thoughtfully tailored and strategically timed, making sure every message strikes a chord that resonates with the donor’s specific interests and previous engagements.

How to Maintain Your Donor Management System

Your donor management system is more than just a tool you can set up and forget about. It needs regular maintenance to stay up-to-date and reliable. Frequent and thorough data hygiene practices ensure that your system keeps pace with the changing dynamics of donor interactions and preferences—all vital for crafting personalized communications and building lasting relationships with your supporters. 

Ensure Clean Data

The first step in maintaining your donor management system is ensuring your data is as clean as possible. This means regularly updating records, verifying new entries for accuracy, and scrubbing the database for outdated information. 

For starters, here is a list of best practices to perform regularly: 

• Establishing comprehensive data policies: To ensure everyone on your team understands your data hygiene practices, it’s important to establish clear policies and assign specific responsibilities for maintaining data health. This means clearly defining how data fields should be set up and used throughout your organization.
• Putting consistent data collection methods in place: To prevent discrepancies in your data, it’s vital to adopt rigorous data collection practices. Efforts should be made to identify and rectify common sources of errors, such as eliminating redundant spreadsheets that can lead to duplicate records or gaps in data.
• Conducting regular data reviews: Departments like fundraising and finance/operations should engage in frequent data reviews, ideally on a weekly basis. These regular check-ins help provide current insights into fundraising effectiveness, financial status, and operational efficiency.
• Standardizing attribution tracking: Utilizing detailed attribution tracking is essential for understanding the impact of your communications, gauging donor engagement trends, and refining your outreach tactics based on solid data.
• Automating data collection: You can reduce manual data entry errors by finding donor management software that integrates with other platforms. This open-ended and flexible integration functionality automatically funnels your data into one place. Automation not only saves time but also enhances the reliability of your data management practices, making your nonprofit’s operations more efficient and accurate.

Remove Duplicates

Duplicate records can clutter your system, lead to inefficient communication, and potentially burden your donors with repetitive messages. To avoid this dilemma, set clear protocols for data entry and use responsive nonprofit CRM software like Virtuous to catch duplicates before it’s too late.

Regularly checking your database for duplicate entries and merging or removing them as necessary is crucial. This practice keeps your database organized and ensures that your reports are accurate, supporting more effective strategic decision-making.

Know How Your Team Is Using Your Donor Management System

To fully leverage the capabilities of your donor management system, it’s essential to have a thorough understanding of how your team uses it. Here’s how you can ensure that your system meets your organization’s needs and maximizes its potential:

• Conduct regular check-ins: Schedule regular meetings with your team to discuss how they use the system. This will help you gather feedback on which features are most beneficial and which might need adjustments.
• Identify training needs: Based on the feedback, identify areas where your team may need additional training. Organize targeted training sessions to improve their proficiency and familiarize them with the system. This extra effort will minimize system errors. To support this, Virtuous offers comprehensive training modules tailored to maximize your team’s use of the system. You can explore these resources at Virtuous Academy.
• Assess system features: Periodically review the system’s features in light of your organization’s evolving needs. This is crucial as it ensures that the system continues to support your goals effectively as your nonprofit grows and changes.
• Customize and improve: Use the insights from these discussions and reviews to customize the system settings and explore new features or modules that could improve efficiency. Customization can involve setting up more intuitive dashboards, automating repetitive tasks, or integrating with other tools used by your organization.

By taking these steps, you create a feedback loop in which your system continuously evolves to meet the changing needs of your team and your organization.

How Virtuous Helps You Maintain Clean Donor Records

The best donor management solutions simplify data hygiene, making it easier for your team to maintain clean and accurate databases. Virtuous helps you stay on top of it with our Data Health Center. This handy tool spots common issues like duplicates, inconsistencies, and outdated entries in your database. You can regularly use this hub to quickly clean up your records, ensuring your information is always accurate and up-to-date. 

Here are a few other ways Virtuous optimizes the data hygiene process:

• Easy opt-in/opt-out: Our donor management system streamlines the management of donor preferences with comprehensive “opt-in” and “opt-out” options on all data collection forms. This ensures that the information in your nonprofit CRM respects donor privacy, protecting your organization from any legal repercussions and maintaining trust.
• Up-to-date contact info: Through Virtuous, your nonprofit can request a National Change of Address update, which systematically refreshes your mailing lists to ensure all contact information is up to date. This process, which ideally should be run quarterly, updates addresses based on recent changes registered with the USPS and incorporates additional contact data from third-party sources when available. 
• Real-time reporting: Virtuous makes accessing and understanding your data straightforward. Use the robust query builder to create custom reports tailored to your needs. You can share key performance indicators with your team, visualize donor locations on a map, or dive into deeper data insights with Virtuous BI. 

Boys & Girls Clubs of the Ocoee Region Improves Data Health and Time Management With Virtuous

Virtuous helped the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Ocoee Region (BGCOR) greatly improve its fundraising operations and data management. Before, the BGCOR team had to rely on programming expertise to run basic reports. Now, anyone on the team can generate reports using the platform’s simple and user-friendly drop-down menus. 

BGCOR leverages Virtuous’ data tools, such as duplicate matching, address validation, and standardized contact records, to keep its donor information clean and trustworthy.

What’s more, Virtuous fits right in with the systems they already had. And with automated CRM analytics, the BGCOR team can swiftly sift through data and make smart, informed choices that push their fundraising and community outreach to new heights. Automation has been a game changer, particularly in time-intensive tasks like processing donor receipts—what used to take ages now can be done 75% faster, giving the team more time to focus on what really matters.

Do you need help cleaning up the data in your donor management system? Schedule a demo with our team today to explore the benefits of a responsive CRM system for your nonprofit.