Regularly scheduled maintenance can keep your files working for you.

By Pegg Nadler

The Database Check-up Checklist

* Interview your personnel and current vendors to re-examine your organization’s marketing and database needs. Talk with senior management, marketing managers, chapter leaders, fulfillment/caging operations, finance staff, information-technology team members, direct-response consultants and content-management consultants. Take the pulse of the current database system, and see if your users are happy with it.

* Revisit your strategic goals to determine if additional database requirements and/or other analysis tools are now needed.

* Review current coding and tracking methods for campaign-information capture. Examine existing data, information storage and updating methods (outside lists, house lists, merge-purge results, etc.). Does your database capture this data? If not, should it?

* Explore your charity’s reporting systems for daily, weekly, monthly and annual fundraising and activities analysis. Which reports come directly from your database-reporting system? What new reports should be generated from the database? Can your database be the main conduit for all reporting purposes across your organization for marketing programs and analysis?

* Present your findings and recommendations to an in-house, database-advisory team (made up of senior managers, marketers, fundraisers, field staff, IT folks and direct marketers). Use their input to determine your next steps for improving the database.

— P.N.

In every nonprofit’s life, there comes a time when questions arise about the general health of its database.

This could come as a result of a new initiative to push the organization ahead. It could stem from a mandate to raise additional funds within a certain period of time. It could be a desire to increase brand awareness among donors and prospects. Or perhaps the organization has recognized the need to identify, communicate and track its audiences’ activities.

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