Top Five Automations Available Today That I Wish I Had as a Nonprofit Database Admin

As a development database manager, I served on teams ranging from three to seven full time fundraisers. In most of those roles, the majority of gift entry and data maintenance was my responsibility as well as generating reports, mailing lists, etc. Technology certainly has changed since I first started in this industry over two decades ago, and today I see so much opportunity for automation and smart technology to reduce manual workloads and enable fundraising teams to step into more strategic relationship building with their supporters.

If I could time travel and give myself the gift of modern automation tools, here are five gifts I would give myself:

1. Customized lists/reports for members of my team

Years ago I would dream of a tool that sent customized notifications to each of my team members with the information they needed, on the schedule that made sense for their work processes, to reduce the number of regular reports being generated. A daily list of gifts from their portfolio of constituents for each Major Gift Officer? A list of event registrations to the event coordinator? A weekly list of upcoming phone calls to the Executive Director? A monthly summary of all meetings to the Director of Development?

Today, many nonprofit CRMs offer reporting automation features that can save you time and improve your team’s access to the information they need to fundraise successfully.

2. Internal major donor notifications

Often, team members would ask me to send an email to let them know any time a large gift was entered into our CRM. This helped them ensure that these donors were thanked quickly and assigned to a Major Gift Officer as needed, but it also added one more manual task to the gift entry process. Being able to set up notifications within your CRM to automatically update your team whenever a large gift is entered helps reduce your manual workload and ensures that these notifications are always sent in a timely manner.

3. Personal emails when supporters reach milestones in their relationship with your organization

We all intend to send a personalized email or text message from an individual on the team when a donor reaches $50,000 in lifetime giving, a member renews for the fifth time, or a volunteer has graciously served your mission for 100 hours, but the reality of tracking these milestones, communicating the information internally and sending them can make the process more complicated. In my days as a database manager, I would have loved a tool that could be set to identify these milestones, queue up the messaging for review, and send them out automatically after approval, drastically reducing the manual workload and creating strategic relational connections with your supporters.

4. Integrating data from third party tools

To many database administrators, the word “integration” has long felt synonymous with importing and spending hours manipulating spreadsheets and resolving system errors. As API functionality has come along, this certainly has improved, but not for all users. Integrations that don’t require daily work or review and simply update records in the CRM on a consistent basis save time and improve reporting accuracy.

5. Managing unsubscribes (especially when using a separate tool for bulk emails)

Tracking consent for communication is more than just good stewardship. In many places, it’s now a legal requirement. If information about unsubscribes or communication preferences lives in more than one place, organizations are at risk of failing to honor a request. Automated management of synchronizing these preferences ensures that organizations can steward their relationships and honor communicated requests.

This list certainly isn’t exhaustive. I’m quite certain that once I had these in place, I’d likely want to start adding automations to create and assign phone calls or emails to gift officers, update specific codes to maintain data integrity and so much more. But getting started with automation really means taking a first step to reducing your manual work and these five are all strategic ways to build better relationships with your supporters. By starting with a focus on connecting to our supporters with intentionality, we’re able to keep building what matters and use automation as a part of the process of connecting passion and purpose to further the mission.

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