Why didn’t we link this donation to the correct campaign?
Why does it not say that John attended the event?
Where is the 5K donation made by Joanne?
Data is missing? Not correct? Filled wrong?
Every nonprofit uses many different tools and platforms and we interact with different people in different places. We have team members, roles and responsibilities.
TL;DR
Identify what platforms donations are coming from.
Identify who or what enters the data (people vs automations)
Flag or Mark the source of the donation on the donation record in the CRM
Identify All the Data Sources
The first step to fixing this problem is to identify all the data sources and who or what is entering this data.
Examples are:
Source 1: Website Donations.
An integration is setup between our Website and our System / CRM. Data is entered automatically by this integration.
Source 2: In-Person Cash Donations.
We collect In-Person donations from events and galas, we enter those in the system manually.
Source 3: Event Registration Platform
When people sign up to attend our events, registrations and ticket information is logged automatically in our system.
Source 4: Satisfaction Survey
After an event, we sent out surveys to measure satisfaction. This is either entered directly by the responder into our database, or we use a third party service like SurveyMonkey and we import this data to our system (or automate it)
Mark the Source
Now that we now identified the sources, let’s make sure these sources are tied to the data.
We may have multiple donation platforms, each serving a different purpose or giving us a unique benefit or reaches a different audience.
Here is a list of possible donation platforms that a nonprofit may use at once with an example for each:
Online Giving → Fundraise Up
Peer-to-peer / Crowdfunding → GoFundMe
Event Registrations → OneCause
Matching Gifts → Double The Donation
DAF (Donor Advised Fund)
These are all donations, but they are all different.
At a later time when we need to perform analysis to make decisions, we would be asking questions like
Which of these platforms is bringing us the most value?
Highest Number of Donations
Largest Amounts of Donations
Which one do we use the most?
Which one is used the most by our audience and constituents?
To be able to answer these questions, we need to mark these donations sources; as in, when the donation gets logged in our CRM, there should be a flag or an identifier saying, this donation came from this platform.
The simplest form of logging this data is to create an input dropdown field with these values and require to have it populated when data is entered.
Create a custom field or column or use a standard field if one already exists in your CRM with any of the following names:
Type
Data Source
Donation Source
Category
Platform
Let’s go with Donation Source for the rest of this article.
Data gets entered in one of two ways, either manually or automatically:
When data is entered automatically such as through integrations, ask your developer to auto set this Donation Source based on the platform the donation came from.
When entering data manually, make sure the Donation Source is a required field so users would always fill it.
Conclusion
In order to perform proper analysis on data, data needs to be entered and categorized, flagging the sources of donations allows us to analyze what platform generated the most revenue and if our campaign efforts are successful or not.