Data Hygiene: Get your technology systems in top shape for your end-of-year campaign

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With end-of-year planning in full swing, don’t forget to add data cleaning to your checklist.

You want your technology systems to be in their best shape before your “busy” season begins, so making sure you start putting some processes into play now by practicing good data hygiene so you can guarantee your campaign will run as smoothly as possible.

Jeff Miller, our in-house data management guru, gives three recommendations for maintaining good data hygiene that you can start doing today.

1) Keep addresses up-to-date and in a consistent format.

Make use of address standardization and validation services offered as part of your CRM or online fundraising system, including CASS certification and NCOA address updates.

Consider adding a front-end address validator, like SmartyStreets, to donation forms and other web forms where addresses are collected.

2) Stop ALL bad data at the source.

It’s not just bad/incomplete addresses that can be stopped at the source. Consider all the sources of incoming data—web forms, data entry forms, system integrations, import/exports—and make sure that they’re consistent with each other and capturing the information that’s really needed.

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Top 3 Best Practices for a Successful Donation Form

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Top 3 Best Practices for a Successful Donation Form | Tackle Nonprofit Technology Consulting

Donation forms are a necessary part of online fundraising. But is your donation form discouraging people from giving online?

Whether you are building a donation form from scratch or utilizing an already built online system to help you, make sure you are setting yourself up for success with these three best practices.

1) Less is more. Make it as simple as possible to fill out.

Have you ever started filling out a form, only to abandon it because it was going to take you way longer than you expected to fill out? Your donors do this too.

If possible, only include the necessary information you need to process your donor’s payment on your donation form. This will depend on your payment provider, but keep it simple and stick to these basics–donation amount, name, email, credit card information.

Keep your design clean and simple without unnecessary graphics. You should have minimal donation amounts (no more than five, but even less is better). Don’t include all the information to fill out for in honor/memory gifts unless selected, or maybe don’t even include this information at all since it is mostly unused for the majority of organizations.

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