Robert L. Weiner at Idealware has a good rundown on using the right tool to manage your donor records and, tempting though it may be - you already have it and you might even be quite good at using it - that tool is not Excel or its sisters. Back Away From That Spreadsheet:

Excel seems like it might be a great fit to manage your donor data. But ... there’s a lot of reasons why it’s not a good idea.

[...] Put down that spreadsheet and get a database that is designed to track donations.

... Excel stores information in what’s called a “flat file” database. This means it’s not designed to handle relationships between data, such as when one record (like a donor) needs to link to several other records (like gifts). And it doesn’t provide a wide variety of features that make tracking efficient and less error prone. What does this mean for you in practice?

As soon as you get another gift from the same person, you must either add a new column for the gift or add a new row for the donor. Adding a new column makes it hard to total and to find gifts by date, but if you include the donor in your spreadsheet more than once, the list is difficult to use for mailings.

[...] You cannot easily link pledges to payments, or track “soft credits” such as crediting individuals for corporate matches or gifts made through their family foundations ... relationships between constituents, such as spouses with separate records, members of households, or employment relationships.

... databases will turn to piles of mush (to use the technical term) without constant vigilance. ... Excel does not provide a rich array of tools to maintain data integrity.

... It can also be cumbersome to analyze Excel data for complex patterns, such as looking for donors have given for over five years, have a cumulative giving level of over $10,000, and attended more than two of your events.

[...] Finally, if your fundraising program is successful, your spreadsheet can grow impractically large. Spreadsheets with thousands and thousands of records become hard to view, print, or manipulate.

How do you manage your donor records, are you stuck in a spreadsheet or do you have a working database? Have you tried any of the specialist tools and how do they work?

Has your organisation tried to engage with many smaller donors or do you depend on just 2 or 3 institutions to stump up large chunks of money?

In the USA, from small charities tro major political parties, the Internet is prioving an excellent way to find and aggregate many thousands of small donors who would not be worth pursuing by traduitional means; how likely is that to work in NZ and how should we go about it?

Suggestions always welcome in the comments

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