As a result of training, cleaning up, and reporting upon hundreds of organizations donor data every year, I thought I would share a few quick tips on how to get past the problem of having fear of your donor database and your data.

1) Understand best practice of how a constituent record should be populated.
2) Have a user manual that defines how your organization populates a constituent record.
3) Document a prioritized list of the problems that exist with how your organization populates a constituent record.
4) Have knowledgeable resources that know your data well that you can call upon at any time to ask questions about how best to populate a constituent record.
5) Reporting should exist that measures all users use of the constituent records in your database.  This reporting must be shared with all staff and reviewed regularly.
6) Accurate reporting should be delivered daily to your inbox to provide all actuals vs. goals that are specific to your role in the organization.  What gets measured gets done.
7) All reporting should be benchmarked upon itself on a month over month basis to measure changes in reporting over time.
8) A query and reporting toolkit should exist to allow all staff to reuse confirmed setups in order to always get accurate results and not have to recreate their own from scratch each time.
9) Document the data clean-ups and enhancements you make each month and how and why they were completed.
10) Receive regular training and demonstrations on your donor database and other technologies and solutions available.  Make a list of what you feel is missing from your donor database and why it would assist.

I hope these tips are helpful for your organization.  I have seen them work very well to increase the use of donor databases and the data that exists within.  There is nothing to be scared of.  :)

Robin Porter
President & CEO
RESolutionsTECH Inc.
http://www.resolutionstech.com