Your Donor Probably Stopped Giving for This Reason

Losing donors often comes down to one thing: bad data.

Your bad data either: A) angered your donor, or B) it’s corrupt and you’re not actually contacting them in the ways you think you are.

The good news? Bad data is an actionable challenge. And in most cases, a donor will forgive you if you can course-correct quickly. But not addressing key issues will often result in frustration and, ultimately, stop your donors from engaging further.

Bad Data to Fix

Duplicate Records

One of the most prominent issues we’ve encountered among clients is not properly handling your duplicate records.

For example, most nonprofits employ a welcome series, often via email and direct mail. But welcome series and/or packages are only successful if the donor is actually new to your organization. The existence of many duplicate records across disparate systems will only lead you to embarrassment if you welcome the same person repeatedly. Eventually, that person will feel frustrated because they feel you do not know them or value their loyalty to your mission.

Campaigns that welcome someone or thank them for total contributions only magnifies your data issues if they are not new or you are not accurately summing all the donations correctly.

Addressing Households Incorrectly

While incorrectly addressing an appeal to Mr. and Mrs. Doe may seem harmless, it becomes a problem if a person’s spouse recently passed away. You’ve just served the surviving partner a painful reminder of their loss — that they now associate with your organization.

Similarly, if your organization defaults to prioritizing the male in the household, you’re ripe for upsetting female donors who are the primary reason you have a relationship with the household.

Consistently updating your data for accuracy is vital in ensuring you get it right. These examples are completely fixable — and could yield huge returns — but you must make data hygiene and governance a priority.

Broken Processes

Plenty of process issues can result in your donor not giving: Staff uploads, CRM system bugs, or caging vendor challenges can result in erroneous data that’s now made unactionable.

Consider when an upload from a spreadsheet drops the leading zero on a zip code: That upload overrides the correct mailing address and that donor is dropped from subsequent mailings.

Consider when donor calls in to complain about receiving too much mail: Instead of offering your team multiple options to code their solicitation preferences appropriately, they’re forced to stamp the donor with an opt-out code instead of opting them down to receiving communication quarterly or annually.

Consider: A bad import that corrupts an address; a system bug that causes issues; failure to import NCOA files into your CRM system resulting in valid addresses getting lost once they lapse out of the USPS files; and so many more issues that could be fixed with proper data hygiene.

Data hygiene can be invasive. And that makes it scary. But if done correctly and with full auditing and reporting, you’ll realize accountability and credibility. It is not unusual to see returns to the tune of being able to reach more than 10% of donors with whom you’d previously lost contact.

Your donors are one of your most valuable assets as an organization; take the time and use the resources available to treat them as such! Embrace your data, recognize it can be improved, and start requiring that clean-up.