Chickens and eggs : what drives nonprofit data management?

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Earlier this week I asked folks what research projects might be of interest for us to tackle next. We already did an extensive deep dive into individual giving behavior since the pandemic began, so my mind started wandering into something relating to nonprofit data management.

When I was writing the donor report , there was one section that got cut significantly since my team thought it would distract from the narrative flow. That related to credit card donations entered manually into the back end of the CRM:

Millions of dollars that ultimately represent a fusion of donor intent and nonprofit employee workload. Here's what I originally wrote here that my team (rightfully) had me cut:

Important: Neon One has long standardized both different types of transactions (e.g. donations versus events) as well as tenders (e.g. check, cash, credit card run online), which has long allowed us to run accurate analysis across thousands of organizations at one time. Neon One also certifies third party integrations to take advantage of standardized data structures in our CRM and other platforms we work with. Besides Neon Pay working between all our different platforms, we also work with vendors who may process donations themselves but then still need to have that data get into the CRM. Yet a large number of transactions were removed from the data panel because the fell into an Other category. This category is when nonprofit organizations create their own tracking fields. We have seen checks from corporations entered as Benevity or donations from auction platforms entered as the name of the platform itself. Data integrity is key for an organization’s ability to report, so consider only using non-standard tenders unless there is no alternative that is provided.

This is a rambling paragraph but ultimately comes down to one core point:

To truly understand the nonprofit sector's path to change, we need to understand nonprofit employee behavior as well as donor behavior

How can we look at database management behavior?

If we are looking at employee behavior, then what I know I can accurately begin to look at is how people enter data into the database. There are a few key data points that are intriguing to me that can point toward behavior:

• How often are people logging into the database?
• How often are people entering people-related data into the database and how often is that data getting modified/deleted? What's the volume of these edits or deletions?
• How often is there a disconnect between donation date fields versus entry dates? For example, every GivingTuesday we have to review both the date of the gift's entry VERSUS the date that might be flagged as when the donor gave it

There is a host of other questions and configurations to take into account here - are people scheduling email appeals in advance or doing them right before they send? Are people getting a bunch of donations from Facebook and then plugging them into anonymous donor accounts, if they do it at all?

Understanding what nonprofit employees are prioritizing in the management of their data will help give clues to what sorts of pain points they are experiencing when trying to scale their operations. Furthermore, focusing in on the friction areas of management can also lead to identifying public-facing items like what fields are being placed on the online donation forms.

Why we shouldn't read too much into this though

Here's the other part of this discussion, which is ultimately aligning it alongside the key questions around what drives donor behavior. Aligning nonprofit administrative behavior should ultimately come down to using the technology toward a primary goal of optimizing the generosity experience as well as growing the capacity of the organization.

And when we looked at checks entered manually side by side with online donations that have a locked-in timestamp driven solely by the donor themselves, look at what happens on December 31.

There is still a spike in support that occurs on the last day of the year. So now the real question is whose behavior is actually driving whose. Do donors give because they want to give on that day? Or are they being conditioned to give on that day by our sector?

Hence why this is ultimately a chicken or egg problem - do we start with understanding existing donor behavior and adapting to it or do we change our behavior first as nonprofit professionals? Mallory Erickson has been really drilling into this a lot lately and she is on to something here. Check out her newest episode with THE Seth Godin that touches on these types of strategic push and pulls:

Where do we go next?

I think some of the critical work that fundraisers need to do is to understand their own priorities and motivations and behaviors. Then ask if these are critical behaviors toward addressing the following:

1. Are you focusing on people, not their money?
2. Are you focusing on the experience of connecting with people?
3. How can you use technology to accelerate the experience?

By using these questions in your own execution of your organization's generosity experience, you can begin to get better insight into your decision-making process and what behaviors are driving momentum and growth.