First Steps To Starting Donor Management

Kim Klein's blog on Steps for Raising $20,000 is a great article to use to show exactly how FundRaiser can simplify donor management.  If you look at the steps suggested to the student in order to raise funds for their trip to Costa Rica, you'll see how each step can be simplified and tracked using FundRaiser.

Database programs are for storing and using information, and we suggest using FundRaiser to store as much information as you need to have for all the aspects of your fundraising efforts. It's not just about donors, although that's certainly a big part, but look at the other aspects to this particular effort.

Form a committee, sure, and then enter them into the database.  Code them as committee members. Enter the parents of club members. Make certain they have full address or email information. Use the word processor to create a letter template that will be personalized (using merge fields and function) with individual information from the name records.  Create the form that they will return to you, as well.

When the committee members make lists of people who might be supportive, enter THOSE people in the database. Make sure you have addresses, emails, phones, etc. This is the heart of your donor database. Hopefully it will grow over time.

You'll be recording each and every gift, of course, with any appropriate comments or further information, in the gift records. And thanking people for donating is quick and easy using another letter template to include gift amount, date, salutation, etc., that you've recorded either in the name record or the gift record. And at the end of the campaign, or any time after that first gift comes in, really, you'll be able to quickly see how much has been donated using the built in reports.

Even FundRaiser Basic can handle these steps, and it's a breeze in Spark, Select and Professional.  If you know of someone who is struggling with tracking their donor activity, please mention us to them, and them to us.  Networking and sharing good ideas is key to building strong donor databases as well as strong donor management software.                         This article revised from the original by Larry Weaver, first published on June 4, 2014

To learn more about how FundRaiser can help with keeping track of donors and donations:

Take an online guided tour of FundRaiser and learn about the features in FundRaiser that interest you the most.