In 2023, total giving decreased by 2.1% when adjusted for inflation. While this statistic shouldn’t be cause for panic, nonprofits should seek ways to improve their operations, forge stronger supporter relationships, and raise more for their missions.
One of the best ways to accomplish these feats is by leveraging donor data. Data-driven insights and decisions yield better results, but only if the data you’re using is clean.
Whether you have an established data hygiene routine or have never considered implementing data hygiene procedures, the five steps below will help you ensure your data is accurate and, therefore, actionable for your nonprofit.
1. Audit Your Database
Start by taking stock of your data’s current state. An audit allows you to get a general idea of the data you currently have and identify any database issues you need to address.
This process is especially helpful if you have a specific data-driven project or campaign in mind. Let’s say you’re creating an impact report to summarize the results of your recent capital campaign and communicate the positive effect donors have had on your community. You may narrow the focus of your audit to relevant data points, such as total dollars raised, the number of beneficiaries your program or project will allow you to serve, and the names of the largest contributors.
As you conduct your audit, determine if there is any missing information, duplicate entries, or incorrect data. Continuing with the example above, perhaps you find that one of your major campaign donors doesn’t have an email address associated with their constituent record, preventing you from sending them the impact report and reaching out with a thank-you message. From here, you can make a plan to rectify any problem areas you identified in your audit.
2. Establish Data Governance
Next, determine who will be responsible for different areas of data hygiene and maintenance. Everyone—from your nonprofit’s leadership to staff members to volunteers—should play a part in ensuring your organization has organized, accurate, high-quality data.
Delegating data hygiene roles helps each team member know exactly what they must do to help keep your nonprofit’s data clean, allowing them to execute their responsibilities efficiently and effectively.
For example, you may separate responsibilities based on data type. NXUnite by Nexus Marketing explains that there are various types of data your organization might collect, including participant, giving, campaign, financial, and marketing data.
You might then decide that different team members should be responsible for managing the data types directly related to their roles. For instance, you may appoint a dedicated data steward in the fundraising department to maintain giving data quality, an individual in the marketing department to keep track of marketing data, and a member of the finance committee to regularly audit financial data.
SureImpact simplifies managing and sharing participant data so your staff can spend their time on what really matters; helping people. SureImpact provides roll-based participant dashboards so that each user is able to manage their unique group of participants.
3. Standardize Data Entry
There are so many instances in which you collect and enter data, whether you’re providing services for your participants, registering and checking in event attendees, signing supporters up for your newsletter, collecting donations, or something else entirely. Data entry standards ensure consensus about the data entry process across your whole organization, allowing your team to prevent future data hygiene issues caused by data entry errors.
For instance, you may create rules for standardizing the following data types:
Mailing addresses. If direct mail is part of your marketing strategy, focus on standardizing supporter mailing addresses to keep this information uniform and organized. For instance, determine whether you’ll use address abbreviations like “Rd.” and “St.” or spell out the full words “Road” and “Street.”
Phone numbers. Your first consideration when standardizing supporter phone numbers should be whether to include the country code. If all of your supporters live in the same country, you can likely omit this information, but if your supporter base is more widespread, you’ll need the country code to contact them. Additionally, you may choose to use parentheses around the area code, like (123) 456-7890, or just dashes, like 123-456-7890.
Titles and abbreviations. When entering their contact information, some supporters may add a title associated with their name, such as Junior or Senior, or their job title, such as Doctor or Chief Executive Officer. Determine whether you’ll abbreviate these titles to “Jr.,” “Sr.,” “Dr.,” and “CEO” or keep them as is.
Ultimately, it’s important to create data entry standards and share them with your team so that everyone is on the same page and your data is consistent for reporting and analysis purposes.
4. Suppress Extraneous Data
Wading through unuseful data can waste time, and using this data can potentially harm your relationships with supporters. Suppression services help mitigate these risks by removing extraneous data from your database.
Common types of suppression services your nonprofit may leverage include:
Do Not Mail suppression, which identifies and removes supporters who have registered to be on “Do Not Mail” lists to prevent sending them unwanted direct marketing outreach, ultimately protecting their privacy and building trust with them.
Prison suppression, which removes addresses associated with federal prisons, state prisons, county correctional facilities, and city jails.
Deceased suppression, which eliminates deceased supporters from your database so you don’t send marketing materials to the deceased individual or their family.
Deduplication, which allows you to remove records that appear multiple times in your database.
Supplement these processes by regularly reaching out to your supporters and asking them to update their contact information and communication preferences.
5. Enrich Your Donor Database
You likely collect a variety of first-party data from your supporters through channels like website interactions, email and SMS marketing, mobile apps, social media, and point of sale (POS) systems. However, this information isn’t always enough to effectively reach your audience, and it can quickly become outdated.
So, what’s the solution? Supplementing your first-party data with third-party data via data enrichment.
According to Deep Sync, data enrichment is the process of adding third-party information to your records to “confirm you have the most accurate, reliable, and comprehensive database possible.” Some types of data you can append to your database include:
Demographics
Contact information
Education
Marital status
Home ownership and property data
Presence of children in the home
Income
Net worth
Lifestyle information
Data enrichment allows you to update your supporter records, but beyond that, it empowers you to provide more personalized communications and experiences that encourage stronger supporter relationships.
For example, let’s say you’re looking to identify potential major donors for an upcoming capital campaign and reach out to them with fundraising appeals. By enriching your database with income, net worth, and contact information, you’ll have a better sense of which donors have the capacity to become major donors and the information you need to reach out to them about this opportunity.
Data hygiene is a necessary part of data-driven marketing and fundraising. It allows you to better understand your supporters and base decisions on accurate information. If you need help improving your nonprofit’s data hygiene, work with a data provider to access their expertise and data hygiene solutions.
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