Five Essential Functions of a Development Database

By Mike Perkins
Senior Consultant
Petrus Development

Why should you invest in good database? Development involves initiating and cultivating relationships with people. In a typical day in every development office, prospects or benefactors are contacted by email, mail, and phone or through face-to-face visits; gifts are received, processed and stewarded; plans are created and executed and, for all of these processes, voluminous data is created and must be recorded, organized and utilized effectively. Simple databases are quickly inadequate and a solid development database is an essential tool for sustainable fundraising efforts. So, why isn’t Excel or Access adequate? What are 5 essential functions of a real development database?

Establishing Donor Profiles

Connecting with prospective and current donors includes obtaining information about them. Every contact should yield additional details that must be recorded in your database, forming the basis for each donor’s profile in relationship to your ministry or organization. Where do they work? What is their title? Do they care about us and our mission? What is their capacity to make a gift? You work to collect contact information for the donor and their spouse, including work, home and cell phone numbers, work and home email addresses, mailing addresses for work, home and, perhaps, their winter or summer residence, and links to their presence on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. A good database provides fields for each of these, plus the ability to record or provide a link to personal notes or call reports that detail the development professional’s observations and insights about each prospect.
Remember that you are recording these vital details for every future development employee of your institution, not just for yourself. You have a hand in creating the institutional memory for each and every prospect and donor. How did they first become connected to your organization? When did they graduate? What were they interested in as students and what are their interests now? What motivates them to give? What other organizations do they support? A good database, in the hands of a careful employee, provides the tool to record every detail accurately AND in a manner that is easily retrievable.

Tracking Donations

If you create a sound development plan and adhere to it, people will support you with gifts. Every gift received must be accurately recorded and accounted for. The entire stewardship and accounting process begins with creating a retrievable record of who has made a contribution. Was it in the form of a check, of stock or other appreciable securities, of land, of valuables or of cash? How does the benefactor want this gift attributed or recognized? What aspect of your program are they supporting? Did it come through their personal account or from their foundation? Who should receive the thank you? Who receives the official receipt? How was the gift valued? These details are supremely important for stewardship of gifts and management of the development process and reconciliation of development revenue with your accounting office.

Stewardship and Communications

Every donor must be thanked promptly, preferably within 24 hours of receiving their contribution. A good database enables you to automatically generate an official gift receipt as the gift is being recorded. You will implement other ways of saying thank you that are personal and specific to each benefactor, but this function of your database lets you rest secure in the knowledge that every gift is promptly and properly acknowledged.
A balanced development plan utilizes direct mailings to your benefactors and prospects. Newsletters, mail appeals, eNewsletters and invitations to events require a considerable investment of staff time and energy. Your functional database facilitates production and distribution of your communication pieces, ensuring accuracy and saving your time for more face-to-face visits.

Running Reports

Each development employee usually records donor input, especially for those prospects and donors who garner special attention from major gift and planned giving officers. Gathering this information, from multiple sources, becomes useful because a good database enables you to manipulate information and run reports that make a development office most effective. The basic reports are run regularly: how much money have we raised in this fiscal year to date? How are we doing in relationship to our goals? Who are the LYBUNTS (donors who gave last year but unfortunately not this year) and SYBUNTS (donors who have given in some years but not this year)?  LYBUNT and SYBUNT reports provide the fodder for weekly appointment setting. Retaining current and past donors is a priority, and a quality database will allow you to be more effective at that goal. 
Planning a development trip to another city? Your database should be able to tell you who the donors in your database who live in that city or in nearby zip codes. Want to know who those who make up your Top 100 benefactors or who are the best prospects in your database for cultivating a planned gift based on past giving? The ability to run reports to find the answers to these questions can be invaluable.

Managing Development Operations

Who should I go see today? Who should other development professionals go see? Which development staff person should be assigned to cultivate which prospects? How many face-to-face visits have I made this year or this month? How many has the director made? Who did I recently visit and what should I be doing to follow through with them and close their gift? What are my specific action items for today, for this week and for next week? A good development manager relies on their database to collect, sort and process information that enables them to make and execute plans and track progress toward established goals. The database is the heart and soul of information processing and effective management, enabling you to apply both the art and science of fundraising. From tracking your development program’s overall cost per dollar raised to utilizing a feature that reminds you that it is now time to again reach out to a specific donor, your database enables you to effectively manage yourself, your staff and your entire development effort.
These are but five of the essential functions of a useful development database. You might choose others, such as their ability to facilitate online contributions or their security features and compliance with NCOA/CASS certification requirements (protecting a donor’s confidential information is your responsibility). If you are working at a large institution, you might value a database’s capacity for managing volunteer information, or student and permanent community members’ registration, or a function to generate Phonathon-related information. Whatever your particular institutional needs might be, your investment in the best possible development database will make every day easier.

Mike is veteran fundraiser with 23 years of experience in university development, not-for-profits, and educational institutions and a Senior Consultant for Petrus Development.