Regularly scheduled maintenance can keep your files working for you.

By Pegg Nadler

The Database Check-up Checklist

* Interview your personnel and current vendors to re-examine your organization’s marketing and database needs. Talk with senior management, marketing managers, chapter leaders, fulfillment/caging operations, finance staff, information-technology team members, direct-response consultants and content-management consultants. Take the pulse of the current database system, and see if your users are happy with it.

* Revisit your strategic goals to determine if additional database requirements and/or other analysis tools are now needed.

* Review current coding and tracking methods for campaign-information capture. Examine existing data, information storage and updating methods (outside lists, house lists, merge-purge results, etc.). Does your database capture this data? If not, should it?

* Explore your charity’s reporting systems for daily, weekly, monthly and annual fundraising and activities analysis. Which reports come directly from your database-reporting system? What new reports should be generated from the database? Can your database be the main conduit for all reporting purposes across your organization for marketing programs and analysis?

* Present your findings and recommendations to an in-house, database-advisory team (made up of senior managers, marketers, fundraisers, field staff, IT folks and direct marketers). Use their input to determine your next steps for improving the database.

— P.N.

In every nonprofit’s life, there comes a time when questions arise about the general health of its database.

This could come as a result of a new initiative to push the organization ahead. It could stem from a mandate to raise additional funds within a certain period of time. It could be a desire to increase brand awareness among donors and prospects. Or perhaps the organization has recognized the need to identify, communicate and track its audiences’ activities.

In any case, your database will play a key role in enabling your organization to effectively monitor activities, better solicit funds and reach intended goals.

That said, is your database system — and your data itself — strong enough to deliver just what you need to move your charity ahead?

Many organizations believe that once the database is built, the system is on auto-pilot. In fact, you should be checking your database and its contents on an annual basis to make sure it’s tuned just right. Let’s examine the state of your database by asking some critical questions.

1. What is your nonprofit’s “business”?
What is your primary mission? What types of activities are conducted on a regular, irregular or one-time basis? How do you construct your fundraising activities? Do you hold events? Do you issue tickets for those events? Do you have an online community of users? Does your organization publish a magazine or newsletter? Do you offer a catalog of products? What is the extent and depth of your direct-mail operations?

Begin your analysis by making sure your current database system meets your current day-to-day operating needs.

2. What does your organization want to do?
Take a step back to assess your business overall. Quite simply, what do you do and how do you do it? How is your organization changing in terms of its fundraising objectives, needs and future programs? These changes might indicate that you have outgrown your existing systems, data needs and reporting requirements. Modifications, overhauls and enhancements might be in order.

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Is It Time for a Check-up?