Establishing a Work Flow for your FundRaiser Database
Most folks want guidelines that will help them get their work accomplished with a minimum of drudgery, mistakes, backtracking, etc., and an established work flow will help with that. Entering gifts and name data after a fundraising event is mostly what is done within donor management software, and should be a regularly scheduled task. The frequency of the task, whether daily or weekly, will depend on the volume of gifts, of course, but it should be a part of the office routine. If written down as a task outline, it will help when the person who normally does the data entry is out sick, or is promoted to another position, or is otherwise taken out of the data entry picture. The person who takes over will appreciate having those steps in logical order, with hints, tips, and tricks in their appropriate places along the way.
Prepare your Thank You Letters first (1)
Having the steps laid out in a logical order is important, and the first thing that will need to be in place, even before any gift entry occurs, is a thank you letter template. You may need several templates available, if you have different sources of giving, or different events happening during the same time period, but the main point is that you must have your letter templates in place BEFORE you begin the gift entry process. Remember that you will be associating a letter template with each gift as you enter them, so, rather than having to go back and change a lot of gifts later, just have the letter template(s) ready to go.
Data Entry begins with a Search (2)
Before you can enter a gift, you need to see if the donor is in the database yet, so, for each donation, the first step is to search for the name record. Of course, if you can't find the name record, you'll have to take the time to create one. You'll need at least a name, but the more information you can enter about the donor at this point, the better.
Enter the Gifts (3)
It's a good idea to put your gift checks in chronological order, with the older gifts entered first, although it's not absolutely necessary. The date you assign your first gift during any session of running FundRaiser will be the date that automatically appears on the next gift you enter, however, so having them laid out in order by date will make entry quicker. Another thing that will speed up your entry of gifts is to take advantage of the Options | Gifts area, which allows you to set default entries for gift codes, including the Mode code, or payment method. You'll be able to make changes on individual gifts as needed, but if most of your gifts are coming in through one event, you can save a lot of time by having FundRaiser fill in the blanks automatically. You can change these options before each gift entry session if needed, or even in the middle of a session, so consider how many gifts you have, and which settings will be the most used for that session.
Generate your Reports (4)
What reports you generate, and how you go about that, will depend on what information you normally want, of course, but I suggest you create a couple of different reports for each gift entry session. The first is simply a Donation report, the first variation, using the entry date range of "today" through "today". This will give you a report that includes only those gifts you entered today. Next might be the Donor report, again using the entry date range of "today". The final report will be a part of the Thank You letter generation, which is the next and final step of the routine.
Generate your Thank You letters (5)
Once all the gifts are entered, for existing and new donors, it's time to run the Automated Correspondence for Gift Thank You's. This will include printing (or email, if you have that set up) your thank you letters, printing corresponding labels or envelopes, printing a report of the gifts that were included in the thank you letter process, and the very last part to be done, marking the thank you's as done. It's very important that you don't mark thank you's done until ALL other printing is completed, because this step removes the "print in next batch" mark from the gifts, and it can be a bit frustrating trying to get back to those records to print, say, labels, if that mark has been removed.
Relax and Enjoy the feeling of accomplishment
It's great when a plan comes together, but in order for that to happen, one needs to have a plan. You may have more tips or tricks or pointers or suggestions you want to include in your plans, and that's great. Just having the plan as a guide will make the task that much easier to complete, and there's nothing set in stone as to how the plan should be written. Whatever plan works for you, use it, and make it available to others in your office, just in case.