Is Your Donor Database Ready for Giving Tuesday?

With Giving Tuesday right around the corner, it’s time to start getting ready for this worldwide day of generosity. We’ve talked about the importance of having a dedicated donor database and the five features you should look for in your nonprofit CRM to ensure success. Whether it’s through peer-to-peer fundraising or branded online donation pages, a database may just your key to success on Giving Tuesday.

But your database is only as powerful as the data in it! And in order to make your database work for you on Giving Tuesday, you’ve got to put in the work to get it ready.

Follow these three simple steps to make sure that your donor CRM is ready for Giving Tuesday.

1. Know Your Data Sources

The first step to setting up your CRM to dominate on Giving Tuesday is to understand just where all your data is coming from. Maybe you have email distribution lists stored in Emma or Mailchimp. Maybe you have event registrations and ticketing stored in Eventbrite. Maybe you have donation data stored in QuickBooks.

Whatever the case, understanding where all your data lives will help you understand where it might be getting lost in the abyss of data silos that don’t talk to one another.

Need help tracking down all your data sources? Use our handy data audit checklist to identify where all your data is coming from… and where you may just be losing it.

2. Get It All In One Place

Once you know where your data is, it’s really important to get it all in one central hub… like your donor database! This is vital to the success of your Giving Tuesday campaign (and really, every part of your fundraising!) for two reasons.

First – when all your data is in one place, you know it’s all being accounted and showing you the full picture of your donors – everything from giving history to event attendance to communication preferences and even personal notes can be stored in one place!

Second – this full picture of your donor allows you to track and report on a comprehensive profile, not just pieces of who they are. Want to know what donors attended an event and gave a donation because of that event? If your event management data is syncing up with your donation tracking data inside your CRM, you’ll be able to know with just a few clicks!

3. Segment for Success

It may seem counter-intuitive, but once all your data is integrated in one central hub, the next step is actually to split it up! But you’ve got to be smart about it. Segmenting all your donors into a few key groups based on common factors will help your data feel more manageable and capable of maximum impact.

Think through your Giving Tuesday goals and then use your CRM’s search and filtering tools to create targeted groups for effective communication and online fundraising before, during and after Giving Tuesday. Here are a few key groups to get you started:

1. Volunteers – Search for contacts who have volunteered with your organization in the past year, and ask them to start a movement by hosting a crowdfunding campaign of their own.
2. Recent Donors – Search for contacts who have donated in the past year, and reach out with ways they can help spread the word before, during and after #GivingTuesday.
3. First-Time Attendees – Search for contacts who have attended an event in the past year and introduce your #GivingTuesday initiative as a first step to engaging them as donors.

Getting your donor database ready for Giving Tuesday is a big deal, but it doesn’t have to take a ton of time. With these three easy steps and just a few minutes of your time, we hope your data will be prepped and ready to help you make an impact.