Hands Off ... It's My Data!

A charitable organization has many stakeholders to communicate with and to nurture. Be they donors, advocates, service users, media, members or volunteers, you need to keep tabs on them all. But like in all organizations, each department has unique needs when it comes to what information they need to store in the database about their stakeholders, so it seems reasonable to assume that you would have a separate database for each department — tailored to its needs. Until you realize that, actually, some people begin to appear in multiple databases. A donor can also be a volunteer, a member and even a service user.