Your donor database is an effective tool for boosting engagement at your nonprofit—if you optimize and leverage it strategically. Learn more in this guide.

By Sarah Tedesco

It’s no secret that effective donor engagement is vital to your nonprofit’s success. Individual donations make up a large portion of most nonprofits’ funding, and those donors generally want to feel connected to and appreciated by the organizations they support. So, you need to build strong donor relationships to secure the necessary resources to further your organization’s mission (and simply to keep the lights on!).

A robust donor database or constituent relationship management (CRM) system is one of the best tools you have at your disposal to boost engagement at your nonprofit. However, this solution can only serve your organization to its fullest potential if you maintain it carefully and leverage it strategically.

In this guide, we’ll discuss four ways to optimize your nonprofit’s donor database so it’s as useful as possible for increasing engagement. Let’s dive in!

1. Create Thorough Donor Profiles

Donor profiles are essential relationship-building tools that are built into nearly every nonprofit CRM. These resources track all of the important information you’ve learned about current and potential supporters of your organization—one profile per donor.

While your database may come with some pre-built fields, you’ll likely have to customize your profiles to account for all of the data you need to track. DonorSearch’s guide to donor profiles recommends including the following sections in each one you create:

[alt text: A checklist of elements to include in supporter profiles to optimize your donor database, which are explained below.]

• Donor overview: Displays the donor’s name, giving status (prospect, one-time donor, repeat donor, etc.), and the date of their last interaction with your nonprofit for quick reference.
• Basic details: Tracks contact information and other general personal data (full and preferred name, pronouns, birthday, preferred communication method, etc.).
• Personal history: Includes a donor’s education level, wealth information, and interests so you know why they support your nonprofit and how much they could give.
• Familial information: Makes your interactions with donors more personal and allows you to involve their spouse, children, and other family members in your mission.
• Professional affiliations: Helps you dive deeper into donors’ financial situations, networking connections, and ability to participate in workplace giving.
• Organizational connections: Compiles donors’ giving history and involvement in other activities at your nonprofit to help you choose the right next steps for engaging them.
• Philanthropic ties: Lets you know if donors have contributed to other similar nonprofits, so you can more accurately gauge their affinity for your mission.

Treat your donor profiles as living documents. Every time a supporter engages with your organization, update their profile with the new data (either manually or automatically) so you can stay on top of their involvement and more effectively strategize ways to deepen your relationship with them.

2. Segment Your Supporters

Once you’ve created profiles for individual donors, segmentation allows you to keep your database organized and communicate more personally with large numbers of supporters. To segment your donors, group them according to shared characteristics found in their profiles, such as:

• Demographics: Age, location, education, marital and family status, wealth
• Psychographics: Hobbies, interests, values, connections to your mission, preferred communication channels
• Giving history: Average donation amount, frequency and recency of giving, lifetime value to your nonprofit
• Non-donation engagement: Event attendance, volunteer hours, board service, in-kind contributions, advocacy campaign participation

From here, you can more easily choose which segments to prioritize during particular fundraising initiatives and send targeted appeals using their preferred channels. For example, a segment of older, wealthy donors might be the best group for direct mail outreach promoting your annual fund. However, a segment of younger supporters who tend to make smaller donations but are passionate about advocacy may be the most likely to see, contribute to, and share a crowdfunding campaign on social media.

3. Integrate Your Database With Other Nonprofit Software

Integrations allow data to transfer automatically from your nonprofit’s other fundraising and management platforms to its CRM, saving your team time and reducing the risk of errors that come with manual entry. 

Depending on your current technology stack, consider integrating the following tools with your database:

• Online donation processors to update supporters’ giving history in real time and track their status as recurring or sporadic donors.
• Event management solutions to log donors’ registrations, merchandise and auction item purchases, and peer-to-peer fundraising participation for a-thon style events.
• Corporate giving tools to track which donors are eligible for and have requested matching gifts or volunteer grants, as well as connections to businesses that might partner with you to sponsor events or host team volunteer days.
• Accounting software to ensure your giving data matches your financial records for accurate reporting and compliance.
• Volunteer management systems to link supporters’ volunteer involvement with their giving, which can help you encourage volunteers to become donors and vice versa.
• Communication platforms to more easily send targeted messages to specific segments and monitor donors’ engagement with emails, text messages, social media posts, and other digital marketing content.
• Prospect research databases to dig deeper into supporters’ wealth and philanthropic details so you can find potential major and planned giving donors who already have a relationship with your organization, which makes cultivation easier.

Some of these tools (particularly corporate giving and prospect research solutions) are usually sold separately from donor databases, while others might be built into or available as add-ons for more robust CRM systems. Before you invest in a new platform, ensure there isn’t a comparable tool available in your CRM already, so you can avoid paying for duplicate software subscriptions. If not, check whether the solutions you’re considering integrate with your existing donor database so your whole tech stack can work together once you make your final decision.

4. Practice Good Data Hygiene

Your donor database will be most useful to your nonprofit if you consistently maintain the data within it to ensure accuracy and relevance. To set up a solid management system, Double the Donation’s guide to data hygiene best practices explains that you should:

• Audit your CRM—i.e., review your entire database to identify and remove any inaccurate, inconsistent, or duplicate data and migrate in any information stored in other locations.
• Assign data responsibilities so your staff knows who is in charge of managing specific categories of information or performing certain ongoing maintenance tasks.
• Evaluate your data collection strategy to ensure you’re prioritizing the right segments and storing data that will help you achieve your nonprofit’s current goals.
• Develop standards for when to enter new data, how to solve common CRM problems, and how to format certain types of information (e.g., abbreviations for streets and state names as seen in donors’ mailing addresses) to ensure consistency.
• Continuously update and validate information, leveraging your prospect research tools or investing in data appending as needed.

Hold training sessions to introduce these best practices to your team, and compile them in a handbook for easy reference going forward. Remember to also cover your organization’s rules for ensuring data security and ethical collection methods in this training to help you maintain donors’ trust and avoid legal issues related to your database.

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The tips above should give you a solid foundation for leveraging your nonprofit’s CRM to boost donor engagement. Remember to adapt your strategy to align with your organization’s goals and the capabilities of your specific database and complementary solutions. Happy fundraising!

Sarah Tedesco is the Chief Operating Officer and Part Owner of DonorSearch, a prospect research company that focuses on proven philanthropy. Sarah is responsible for managing the production and customer support department, which focuses on client contract fulfillment, retention, and satisfaction. She also collaborates with other team members in various areas like sales, marketing, and product development. Sarah holds an MBA from the University of Maryland and worked as a foundation prospect researcher before joining DonorSearch, providing her with industry experience that she applies to her responsibilities day-to-day.