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Whether you’re planning a nonprofit giving day or district-wide school fundraiser, data should be the backbone of your strategy. But it’s not enough to have haphazard data that’s siloed across multiple systems. To drive strong financial reporting and effective community outreach, your fundraising data must be accurate and well-organized.

If your system is cluttered with messy records, your team will inevitably deal with bounced communications, redundant outreach efforts, and skewed revenue projections. These issues can waste valuable staff time and ultimately affect the success of your fundraisers. That’s why a data cleanup is essential before launch. 

Follow these steps to organize your donor records now, and you’ll set your team up for more confident decision-making and better resource use later.

1. Audit Your Fundraising Data

First, take a step back to see what exactly you’re working with. How many systems in your tech stack house supporter data? Do they connect? How recently was the data in each platform updated? Ensure that all your fundraising platforms integrate with each other to create a single source of truth.

Next, audit your constituent records to get the full picture of your current state and uncover gaps in your data. To evaluate basic data hygiene, follow these steps:

1. Identify missing fields. Focus on auditing the most critical information for fundraising campaigns, such as email addresses, phone numbers, and primary mailing addresses. To segment donors and personalize appeals, you should also track secondary information like communication preferences, demographics, and employer data.
2. Assess engagement history. Flag records that show no donation or engagement activity over multiple years to better understand the true size of your active audience. For instance, you might discover that 30% of your school’s alumni list hasn’t opened an email in five years. Since these individuals’ information may be outdated, consider removing them from your list for high-cost direct mail appeals.
3. Review household groupings. Check for disconnected family members or spouses who should be linked. Grouping households together helps you avoid sending multiple expensive solicitation packets to the same physical address.

During your audit, look beyond empty fields and specifically examine the formatting of your financial data. Make sure that your formatting clearly distinguishes more complex records like pledge installments and matching gift requests before the fundraiser starts. This will give your finance team a better idea of expected revenue versus actual cash on hand.

2. Remove Duplicate and Outdated Records

Duplicate entries and outdated information lead to wasted resources and potential hits to your institution’s credibility. For instance, sending the same major gift appeal to a supporter three times signals to them that your organization is disorganized and potentially careless with their donations.

Fortunately, proactive data hygiene helps you mitigate these risks and ensure your outreach lands exactly where it needs to. Improve your data’s accuracy by:

• Using automated deduplication tools. Automation saves your team time and helps you maintain consistent records. The best fundraising platforms include built-in deduplication features that automatically identify and merge identical constituent profiles, combining giving histories into a single, comprehensive record.
• Merging records carefully. If you don’t have an automated process or occasionally need to merge duplicate records by hand, designate a master profile to retain the most complex financial history. Be especially careful merging records with recurring pledges or long-term grant allocations to prevent your finance department from losing the historical thread of a major funding source.
• Processing against the NCOA database. Consider using National Change of Address services to update your donors’ residential information. This way, you can easily remove outdated mail addresses and ensure that your direct mail appeals reach the correct supporters, even if they recently moved.

If you’re worried about the accuracy of your records, data appends can also be a great resource. Professional appends are external data hygiene services that fill in missing demographic or contact details. For example, you might use an append to update supporters’ phone numbers or add employer information to fill in gaps in incomplete records.

3. Clarify & Improve Your Data Entry Standards

Next, set your database up for long-term hygiene and accuracy by establishing uniform rules for data entry. When team members input information in different ways, it compromises the integrity of your fundraising data. Standardizing your approach before your next campaign begins prevents this from happening.

Meet with your development team and compile a comprehensive document that outlines clear formatting rules for your staff, ensuring that everyone enters data in line with these standards. 360MatchPro’s data hygiene guide recommends creating specific rules for:

• Addresses: Outline specific conventions for common terms, such as whether your organization will use Street or St. in mailing addresses. This prevents your system from reading identical addresses as separate households.
• Phone numbers: Determine whether staff should use dashes and parentheses when inputting donors’ phone numbers.
• Zip codes: Choose to use either five-digit zip codes or the ZIP+4 format for supporters’ mailing addresses. 
• Names and titles: Dictate how prefixes, suffixes, and formal titles should be captured to ensure your automated messages generate professional, accurate greetings.

Additionally, consider restricting free-text fields in your database wherever possible. They’re helpful for some efforts, like recording hyper-personalized details to cultivate major donors. For general data entry, however, staff should always use pre-populated drop-down menus to improve tracking.

4. Train Your Team on Sustainable Habits

Maintaining a clean database is an ongoing, collaborative effort, which means your work doesn’t end once the fundraiser starts. Each person who uses your fundraising software has a responsibility to keep organizational data clean, so they should be trained accordingly.

Start by improving the onboarding process for new team members. Incorporate data hygiene into their initial training and provide easy access to your data entry guidelines. Then, schedule data review sessions on a recurring basis. Ideally, your staff should have dedicated time each month to update profiles, review recent entries for errors, and discuss any challenges they’ve run into.

For larger fundraising teams, consider designating one person to monitor overall data quality, too. This leader can spot-check batches of recent donations for accuracy and serve as a model of good data habits for the team.

When staff members understand how data entry directly impacts the success of your fundraising goals, they are much more likely to slow down and double-check their work.

A healthy database is key to running successful campaigns that resonate with your community. Use these tips at the beginning of your fundraiser planning process, so your team spends less time untangling administrative errors and more time securing the donations that fuel your mission.