As your nonprofit grows and touches more lives, your database grows, too…and can quickly take on a life of its own with duplicate records, old addresses, and outdated information.
Most nonprofits focus on donor relationships and understand the importance of personalizing communications. However, this will only work when you can be assured that your data is clean and your records are accurate.
In this article, we’ll examine why having data in prime condition matters and then share some of the tools CharityEngine’s fundraising software offers to help nonprofits keep data in tip-top shape. If you’re not a CharityEngine client, the article will give you some questions to ask your CRM vendor to ensure your tech is on the job.
The Perils of Poor Data Hygiene
While a “dirty” database can slow you down, there’s more at stake. Here are some critical dangers of dirty data:
- Offending a donor: If a donor has two contact records (Jane Smith vs. Mrs. John Smith), you could be asking someone who just donated for another gift. That donor could quickly get frustrated and withdraw support. It’s the same with misspelled names or thanking someone for a donation they didn’t make. If you have inaccurate data, all your personalization attempts will be futile at best and harmful at worst.
- Inaccurate reporting: Incorrect reports of donation amounts or inconsistent entries can impact everything from reports to financial statements, forecasting, and budgeting. You could also come to the wrong conclusion about the effectiveness of your programs or the success of your campaigns.
- Inefficient fundraising campaigns: Without the ability to accurately segment your audience and use personalized outreach, you’re not maximizing your fundraising efforts. You might also be wasting money on mailings to inactive donors, outdated addresses, or even the wrong person.
- Poor decision-making: Data is the foundation on which most of your strategic decisions will be made. When your team or your board relies on faulty information, your programs could be misaligned, initiatives might be under or over-funded, and your donor outreach strategies will likely miss their mark.
- Wasting money: If your system has two records for the same person, such as a home and work address, you’re wasting postage sending direct mail to both places.
- Lost trust. If you send the wrong tax receipt to a donor or don’t correctly acknowledge a gift, your professionalism and competence can be questioned. Rarely will someone trust you to steward their money if it seems as though there’s confusion and disarray. Donor attrition is, perhaps, the most significant risk of dirty data.
Poor data hygiene detracts from the donor experience and can easily annoy a donor enough to cause them to leave your nonprofit.
How CharityEngine Can Help with Data Hygiene
The easiest way to monitor the cleanliness of your data is to count on your nonprofit CRM to do the work for you. Here are a few ways CharityEngine’s fundraising platform helps with data hygiene.
- Superior Duplicate Detection: Many systems only match duplicates on email addresses, but our advanced data hygiene tools match on more than a dozen data fields. Matching only based on email greatly increases the possibility of duplicates. Even if a single person uses two different emails (personal and work), our system can identify a duplicate record and prompt you to merge accordingly. In this case, other systems would create two records because their only key is the email address. And CharityEngine scans engagement records beyond donations (such as shopping cart or event registration) to ensure duplicates are identified.
- Matching and Deduplication: Once the advanced algorithm identifies duplicates in both your existing and new incoming data, the system will allow manual and automated deduplication. You can choose how to handle the duplicate records. If one record has a mistyped address, you can merge the records instantly.
- Data Cleaning Tools: It’s easy to launch a tool to find data matches within the system. In this way, nonprofits have the tools to maintain clean data at any time. If duplicates are found, you can merge a group of records at once or merge them manually. And the system can alert you to record discrepancies so errors are fixed immediately.
- Email List Cleaning: This tool will inspect your email list and ensure all emails are valid. This protects nonprofits from spam traps and helps with email deliverability.
One of our clients told us their CRM, Bloomerang, couldn’t match records if the address and email had even slight errors, often double charging donors. The client wrote, “With CharityEngine, I can easily catch and manage potential duplicates, whereas Bloomerang had a hard time catching duplicates and wasn't always accurate.” You can read the full success story.
What’s Wrong with Relying on Email Matching?
If most systems use email matching to find duplicates, why isn’t this good enough? There are many reasons!
- Constituents might mistype their email address, creating a new contact record. CharityEngine would flag this and allow you to merge the records.
- One donor can use multiple emails, such as work and personal.
- Households can share an email, so the donor records are attached to a household and not an individual donor.
- Constituents might not provide an email.
A system that matches dozens of data fields is significantly more accurate.
Better Data with CharityEngine: Data Enrichment
Data enrichment is the process of improving the value of existing data by enriching it with information from other sources. What does this look like in CharityEngine?
We offer several data enrichment tools so you can make the most of the comprehensive data collected in CharityEngine.
- Gift probability scoring appears on each contact record and uses advanced algorithms, thousands of data points, and Business Intelligence (BI) to let you know when you should reach out to a donor and what an appropriate ask would be.
- WealthEngine integration is a feature that helps nonprofits quickly identify potential major donors.
- Address geolocation updating means that the system will update location information associated with an address.
- Integrated email validation service: The system verifies email addresses are valid, keeping your sending reputation in good shape.
- Data cleaning on ZIP+4: This data cleaning tool improves the accuracy of mailed outreach and, for advocacy efforts, helps quickly match constituents with their correct elected official.
The Most Reliable Email Deliverability
Our platform is so powerful that clients enjoy a 99% email deliverability rate, meaning that their emails land in the correct email inboxes and aren’t marked as spam almost 100% of the time.
One of the ways we achieve this is to focus on email hygiene and verify we have enough information and verification to send emails to a group. CharityEngine’s platform offers four critical components of email hygiene:
- Automated Email Verification: It is easy to enable a notification that confirms recipients want to receive emails from your nonprofit.
- Engagement Scoring: See a quick score letting you know how engaged a donor is. Whether they’ve participated in advocacy efforts, content consumption, email engagement, or a shopping cart, you can identify your most engaged donors.
- Suppression of Unverified Emails: If emails aren’t verified, the system will automatically suppress them.
Keeping Nonprofits Successful
Maintaining clean, enriched data is essential for any nonprofit wanting to enhance donor relationships, increase fundraising efficiency, and make informed strategic decisions.
CharityEngine’s data health tools offer a comprehensive solution to many common data challenges, from detecting duplicates to ensuring accurate mailing addresses and improving email deliverability.
With powerful features like advanced deduplication, data enrichment, and email hygiene, nonprofits can ensure their donor databases remain in pristine condition. This will ultimately support better outreach, engagement, and long-term donor trust. By prioritizing data hygiene, your nonprofit can focus more on its mission and less on managing inaccuracies!