At Kuban & Co. we are passionate about quality donor management systems for nonprofits! Having a quality system impacts so many aspects of your development office. It will help you feel more organized, improve your ROI tracking, and benefit your communication with donors.
We're going to share our top 7 features we look for in a donor management system and why!
First are data quality tools (our team member Sarah's favorite! This includes tools like duplicate checking, address verification, and easy merge tools.
Second is a great letter generation tool. Long gone are the days where you have to pull a donor report into excel and run a mail merge. A good donor management system can generate letters in your system and automatically list them on the donor's profile. Extra points if you can edit them later if you have to re-run them!
Third is quality reporting. I have seem some terrible reporting tools and they make the lives of your development team extremely difficult.
Fourth are integrations with other great development tools (i.e. accounting software, event software, campaign / peer to peer tools, etc). Any time you can avoid duplicate entries the easier your life will be and the more reliable your data will be!
Fifth is donor retention tracking. Donor retention is a great way to signal how well you are doing at maintaining quality relationships with your donor base. A good system should be able to measure your donor retention for you.
Seventh is household management. A married couple is a married couple... until they're not married anymore. Then what do you do about those donor receipts? Are you currently keeping everything under one profile? A great donor management system will have the ability to create individual donor profiles, with households to group them under. This allows for joint statements, but also separating things out if that time comes.
Last but not least is campaign tracking. It's important for a development team to know how well their campaigns are performing. We recommend finding a system that easily tracks your goals and status of your campaign results.
Comments