You can’t have gifts without donors—and you can’t have a useful fundraising system without the ability to easily see and maintain up-to-date donor information. Just logging donor names and addresses isn’t enough to make the most of these relationships. These systems tend to track a lot of information about each donor. How they manage and summarize that information can be an important differentiator that makes or breaks a system’s usefulness to your organization.
Can you store all the phone numbers, email addresses, and postal addresses you need, including seasonal addresses (so mailings follow them to summer or winter homes)? Can you clearly mark when someone should not be contacted at all? What if your donors are on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media—can you store their social media handles? Can you see what they are posting online?
Systems vary in how they handle “householding”—tracking multiple people who live together. Some systems make it easy to track information about individuals in a household separately but allow you to store a preferred salutation for letters and send them combined mailings. Others group all the people in a household into a single record and manage them all together, or let you define relationships between separate records. And some require sub-optimal workarounds for householding, such as requiring you to mark one member of the couple as “Do not mail.”
It can also be useful to track other relationships between different donors—for example, siblings or coworkers. Can you track a company or organization, and see the people that work for it? It’s also useful to track which staff members know which donors—at least the primary staff member who owns the relationship, if not all staff members with connections—as well as board member relationships with donors.
The initial view of a contact record is important to building donor relationships. When a donor calls, can you quickly see their involvement, giving history, where you got their name, and your record of communicating with them? Does the system automatically record emails and letters sent to donors on contact records? Can your staff log all calls and contacts with donors so staff can see a full history? Can you add emails sent from outside the system to a contact record? Can you filter this list to only show certain types of interactions? Do you need to leave the system to access documents related to a donor, or can you attach them directly to the donor record for easy viewing? Is this information well-organized and easy to access? Can you easily access it via a mobile device or tablet?
Information is dynamic. Some systems integrate with third-party address update tools to help you keep you donor contact information as up to date as possible. You can also ask donors to submit updates to their information online, either by using contact forms that connect to fields in the database or by providing a self-service donor portal that allows a donor to manage contact and payment information.
Since the majority of systems price subscriptions on the number of contact records, a good duplicate management tool is critical for keeping costs down (and keeping your data clean). Does the system match records by requiring a primary “key” that is unique to all records (i.e. email address)? Or can it highlight potential matches based on several fields in the system (e.g. first name, last name, address, etc.)? Does it flag potential duplicates automatically or do you have to trigger a duplicate checker? How easy is it to merge duplicate records?
As with gift records, most systems will provide you with the flexibility to define custom fields for contact records to collect information not included with standard fields. Some systems group all the custom fields together in one section of the contact record, while others allow you to place custom fields anywhere on the record screen.
Many systems now include some sort of integration with a third-party donor research or wealth-screening tool. These integrations may require a separate subscription, but some vendors have negotiated agreements that allow clients to perform a certain number of profile searches. This data from these tools is captured on the donor record, and some vendors even combine this information with donor interactions in the system to create prospect ratings and donor engagement scores.