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Learning Objectives - Detailed

People and Organizations: Managing Biographical Data
Every donor database starts with the people and organizations in it. Learn how to handle common challenges in managing biographical data, including:

• Setting name standards
• Managing contact data (addresses, email, phone numbers)
• Other biographical data to consider tracking, and how to track it
• Setting up your database to be inclusive of diverse gender identities
• Managing relationships between records: households, family and other interpersonal
  relationships, and relationships between people and organizations
• Basic data hygiene

Gifts: From Basics to Complex
Gift entry is one of the most challenging aspects of donor data management. We’ll cover IRS compliant gift entry basics and more complex gifts too.

• Anonymous donors
• In-kind gifts
• Soft credits
• Employer matching gifts
• Tribute gifts
• Pledge management
• Tracking appeals, campaigns and funds

Prospect Management: Focus on Your Best Prospects
Good prospect management practices will help you attain major gift success. You’ll leave this session with a solid understanding of prospect management basics, and tools you can use right away in your office and in your database to step up your organization’s major gift game. The techniques you learn will help you focus on your best prospects, use your time efficiently, and ensure that none of your donors “fall through the cracks”.

• Tracking who is a prospect
• Tracking progress through the prospect/moves management cycles
• Tracking activities and next steps
• Tracking asks
• Tracking volunteer and executive director activities
• Prospect management reporting
• How to keep your pipeline moving

Reporting
No matter which donor database you use, there are some common principles that underlie report development. This session will give you some tips that will make it easier for you to get the data you want out of your donor database. We’ll also look at a suite of recommended go-to reports that will help you manage your daily operations and evaluate your fundraising success.

• Query-building basics
• Report design considerations
• Go-to reports

Volunteers and Event Attendees: Managing Engagement with Your Organization
Tracking how your constituents get involved with your organization is critical to managing that activity and better understanding your relationships with your donors. This session will cover managing volunteers, event attendance and more. We will cover the pros and cons of using your donor database versus a standalone tool. We’ll also discuss how to keep you donor database and external volunteer and event management systems in sync.

• Managing volunteers
• Managing events
• Syncing your database with external volunteer and/or event management systems

Data Hygiene: Clean Up Your Database and Keep It Clean
We’ll talk about a variety of strategies you can do to clean up your database and keep it clean. From database standards and documentation to audits, appends and cleanses, you have many options. This session will demystify them and give you a place to begin improving your data’s cleanliness and usefulness.

• Data entry standards and documentations
• Data audits
• User permissions
• Database cleanses and appends

Metrics
Establishing smart fundraising metrics can help you stay on track to meet your fundraising goals. We’ll cover metrics development including design, data collection, data analysis, and putting your results into action. We’ll also look at common metrics for a few areas of fundraising: annual fund, major giving, planned giving, foundation/corporate relations, and events.

• Designing your metrics
• Collecting metric data
• Analyzing and deploying metric data
• Evaluating whether your metrics are working
• Best practices for metrics by fundraising area