Digging Deep to Make the Most of Your Donor Data

6. Speaks your language. For many years, fundraisers have been forced to settle for a donor database that was designed with a “one size fits some” mentality. The next-generation donor database eliminates such constraints and gives you the flexibility to tailor your CRM in a way that meets your needs and business processes. Fields can be modified to reflect the language that you use in your organization. New fields can be added to incorporate information that is important to people in different departments (e.g., donors’ musical instruments played or locations of marathons finished). These changes can be made using clicks, which means that you no longer have to engage your IT department or a third-party techie to write code. The open and extensible nature of such a CRM also gives you the ability to move data in and out of the system — because your data should work for you and not the other way around.