Digging Deep to Make the Most of Your Donor Data
5. Works where you do. Whether you are on the road, at home or in the office, as long as you have Internet access, you can view, add or edit data in your CRM. You no longer have to wait until you are back at the office to update information about a constituent. Having detailed donor information at your fingertips can take your face-to-face engagements to an entirely new level.
Picture a scenario where you bump into a major donor while mingling before a dinner. Gone are the days when you scrambled to find Jane in development to find out whether the major-gift proposal has been presented yet. Now, by the time you sit down for your meal, you can review the proposal’s status, verify volunteering history, double-check spouse's name and discover a mutual acquaintance. You will have plenty of relevant information to talk about during the dinner and can easily show how much you value the donor's relationship with your organization.
6. Speaks your language. For many years, fundraisers have been forced to settle for a donor database that was designed with a “one size fits some” mentality. The next-generation donor database eliminates such constraints and gives you the flexibility to tailor your CRM in a way that meets your needs and business processes. Fields can be modified to reflect the language that you use in your organization. New fields can be added to incorporate information that is important to people in different departments (e.g., donors’ musical instruments played or locations of marathons finished). These changes can be made using clicks, which means that you no longer have to engage your IT department or a third-party techie to write code. The open and extensible nature of such a CRM also gives you the ability to move data in and out of the system — because your data should work for you and not the other way around.
