Knowledge transforms nonprofit advertising and fundraising methods; by incorporating actual supporter data, you possibly can personalize your campaigns and construct real relationships together with your donors.
Nonetheless, when your knowledge is remoted in numerous methods, it may be troublesome to generate helpful insights. These remoted methods are known as knowledge silos, and so they can forestall your crew from unlocking key developments amongst your supporter base—limiting your outreach progress.
On this information, we’ll present steps you possibly can take to interrupt down knowledge silos so your nonprofit can use its knowledge to its fullest potential.
1. Set up knowledge governance.
Begin by creating clear insurance policies, procedures, and pointers for knowledge administration. These guidelines function a reference level for all crew members dealing with knowledge, making certain consistency throughout your group.
These insurance policies ought to embrace areas like:
- Standardization. Decide the way you’d like employees members to enter sure knowledge sorts to standardize knowledge entry. For instance, in case you’re inputting the dates of volunteer outings, resolve in case you’d like your crew to make use of an MM/DD/YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD format.
- Duplication. Let your crew understand how you’d wish to deal with duplicate entries, whether or not by merging these data or deleting extraneous data.
- Verification. Survey your donors recurrently to make sure the information you’ve got saved for them is right. You may additionally use instruments like an e mail scrubbing device to confirm the accuracy of your supporter data.
Moreover, assign knowledge stewardship obligations to completely different departments and crew members to ascertain accountability. For instance, when conducting prospect analysis, it’s essential to have a degree individual for getting into knowledge, figuring out these with excessive giving capability in your database, and creating donor prospect profiles.
2. Put money into a centralized knowledge platform.
With the correct donor database or constituent relationship administration (CRM) system, you possibly can centralize your knowledge and create a single supply of reality for all priceless data your group collects. Right here, you might retailer knowledge associated to:
- Donor or member administration. Basic donor or member knowledge—akin to names, ages, contact data, and communication preferences—help you attain your constituents and personalize your communications with them.
- Fundraising. Preserve observe of fundraising metrics—akin to every donor’s particular person presents, your common donation quantity, and donor retention fee—to evaluate your technique.
- Advertising and marketing. Marketing campaign knowledge you might acquire contains e mail open fee, click-through fee, web site site visitors sources, and social media engagement. This data permits you to determine your advertising strengths and weaknesses so you possibly can enhance your method.
When knowledge from all of your initiatives is in a single platform, you should use it to tell these branches of your operations. As an example, use donor demographic data to create segments that help you run extra focused advertising campaigns or submit metrics about your previous fundraising marketing campaign on social media to encourage your supporters to present.
3. Combine your current methods.
Integrating your current instruments together with your database or CRM ensures that knowledge flows seamlessly between platforms, eliminating the necessity for guide knowledge entry and stopping database errors. Look to combine the next instruments together with your CRM:
- Fundraising platform. Add particular details about donors’ giving historical past to the donor profiles in your database to raised phase your supporters and comply with up with acceptable donation requests sooner or later.
- Electronic mail advertising software program. Add contacts out of your CRM to your e mail advertising software program for broader attain, or create data for brand new e mail subscribers in your database. Then, you possibly can automate e mail communications to sure segments and observe e mail engagement metrics inside your CRM.
- Occasion administration instruments. Retailer essential data out of your occasion administration instruments in your CRM—akin to attendee knowledge, registration metrics, and funds raised—to energy your future occasions.
As Double the Donation’s nonprofit knowledge assortment information explains, selecting platforms that seamlessly combine reduces the effort and time required for knowledge administration and permits your crew to focus that power on mission-critical actions as an alternative.
4. Conduct common knowledge audits.
The extra disparate knowledge sources and methods your group has, the extra probably knowledge errors and inconsistencies will happen. Forestall small knowledge points from spiraling into bigger issues by conducting common knowledge audits.
Deep Sync’s knowledge hygiene information explains that auditing your knowledge is step one within the knowledge hygiene course of and offers a sensible view of the present state of your knowledge earlier than tackling any drawback areas. Auditing your knowledge together with your fundraising or advertising targets in thoughts helps you focus your efforts on the information factors you want in your marketing campaign.
For instance, in case you’re trying to interact main donors in your upcoming capital marketing campaign, slender in on related knowledge throughout your audit, akin to giving capability, donation historical past, and employment knowledge. This train can even assist you determine any gaps in your database and whether or not you must conduct an information append to fill on this data.
5. Promote inside knowledge sharing.
Communication amongst completely different crew members and departments is the important thing to profitable nonprofit operations. Whenever you improve collaboration amongst your employees, they’ll share essential knowledge with one another and facilitate well-informed decision-making. Contemplate how one can encourage completely different departments to work collectively to enhance your campaigns.
Extra formal methods that you may promote inside knowledge sharing embrace:
- Common e mail updates with high-level overviews of every crew’s present priorities
- Month-to-month crew conferences through which division leaders can clarify their work in-depth and reply any questions
- Collaborative instruments like challenge administration software program and document-sharing platforms that make it straightforward for workers members to work collectively
Exterior the office, you can too arrange team-building occasions that enable employees members from completely different departments to get to know one another. Constructing this camaraderie empowers crew members to work collectively and share knowledge that helps every crew develop a deeper understanding of your group’s operations.
To run extremely efficient fundraising and data-driven advertising campaigns, you must unify your knowledge and guarantee it’s constant throughout groups and platforms. Breaking down knowledge silos empowers you to base choices on correct data, strengthening your efforts and fueling your mission.
Concerning the Creator
Gabrielle Perham
Gabrielle is the Director of Advertising and marketing & Gross sales Operations for Deep Sync. She joined the group in 2017 and brings 20 years of expertise in strategic advertising, branding, communications, gross sales enablement, and digital advertising. With a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done angle and a big-picture mindset, Gaby loves fixing advertising and enterprise challenges. She earned each a B.S. in Advertising and marketing and an M.B.A. in Advertising and marketing Administration from the College of Tampa. Gaby enjoys spending time together with her fiercely outspoken daughter; mountain climbing and kayaking; rocking out within the first row of a reside present; and giving again to her area people.
