The Agitator has many helpful posts about how to effectively onboard donors, what to learn from them, how to thank donors, and what that post-acquisition journey should look like.

BUT…all this good advice is for naught if you don’t have fast or timely data systems.

Effective thank you’s, effective donor journeys, and effective retention all hinge on a single, simple piece of information: knowing that a donor has just donated.

And yet this critical piece of information is often ignored.  There are organizations where it’s 1-2 months from contribution until that fact is recorded in the CRM.  Organizations where membership databases are separate from donor databases, so donors are treated differently (or not at all) based on where they send their check.  Organizations where file cabinets reign supreme.  Organizations where data syncs are performed only when someone feels like pulling the csv file.

Too often fundraisers are held hostage to these systems.  To the donor, this dilatory behavior comes off as “this organization simply doesn’t care”, when, in fact, it’s really your systems that don’t allow you to express your gratitude and caring.

If you’re a fundraiser faced with this problem two questions should arise: 1) How do I get folks in my organization to care about these systems?  and 2) once they care, how do we fix this?

Why care about speed?  Every bit of data involving your constituents that is delayed or not properly captured represents lost revenue.  Consider a recent study where a nonprofit hospital batched its asks to former patients every 2-4 months.  Every 30 days that passed after a patient’s first visit but before a solicitation went out reduced response rate by 30%.  Every 30 days that passed before a solicitation went out after the patient’s final visit cut response rates in half.

These leads shriveled on the vine because the organization’s data systems were set up for the convenience of the organization – with batched printing – and not for the convenience of the prospective donors – with on-demand printing and automated systems.

We also saw this recently with thank-you calling.  There’s evidence that thank-you calls increase first-year revenue when done closely following the gift.  However, thank you calling at the five-month mark was an expensive nothing. Yet, be careful by being aware of the asking/giving process and timeline: we’ve seen the opposite as well. In street fundraising a welcome call done too soon has questionable quality control value as the donor is still in too much of a “yes” mood.

Some will say this takes time to do right, and of course they’re right.  But doing it right also saves time.  As we’ve discussed, automated communications can run without human intervention, triggering the proper message for the donor at the right time and saving you time.  But only if the data is promptly available and accurate.

If you need a hard-financial argument to make your case for improvements in your organization’s systems and processes here’s one from personal experience. When I started at Amnesty nearly five years ago, it took up to three months to process new F2F recruited donors. It was all done manually. I estimated that each month the organization was losing about 8000 Euros from freshly recruited donors. Due to delayed processing and lack of a prompt thank you some monthly donors stopped giving.  Apparently, their gift was not that urgently needed. Even worse, during the manual processing of csv files, some recruitment files were when some of the folks processing the gifts went on holiday. Fortunately, when the cost of these unnecessary delays was pointed out the board quickly understood the wisdom of investing in decent data systems (a one-time capital expense that pays dividends for years) as opposed to doing nothing and continuing to lose or losing 8000 Euros each month.

How do I fix my systems?  Some important tips:

• Any database that isn’t connected to the database of record or the main data system should either be connected or killed. If data isn’t quickly deposited in your central data system, it doesn’t exist.
• Anything offline needs to be brought online. Your paper records are unsearchable in a structured way.  However, digitization projects can be costly and time intensive.  At worst, start by creating no new paper, with all new information going into your central data system.  If that requires you to get paper from the file cabinet to put into the data system, so be it.  In this way, you will have digital records going forward and a concerted effort going backward.
• It’s OK to do an export from one database and an import into another one manually… but only as a stopgap. If that’s what is necessary to make your data systems function quickly, do it, but view it only as a bridge to creating an automated two-way sync between databases.  The manual stopgap process will help you map field to field in ways a programmer should be able to understand and automate.

Complex and time-consuming steps, yes, but when your competitors in the for-profit world and partners in the nonprofit world can deliver experiences based on near-real-time data, you either have to catch up or die.

Ilja

P.S. On Friday I’ll explain the importance of owning your own data and the dangers in not doing so.

P.P.S. Editor’s Note.  The Agitator has just released: UPDATE: Fundraising and the Coronavirus Pandemic. Download it free here.