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Kaitlin Windle, CEO & Founder at Apte and Mike Smith, Fundraising Consultant and Data Guru at Kiptum Consulting met earlier this year and started discussing the root cause of pain for development reporting which stems from not having clean data foundations.
Today we see development offices under more and more pressure to present Board-ready presentations with advanced analytics, using data and donor analytics to drive strategy. There are ways to make this data easy to analyze and understand, and, conversely, there are ways to set up data that makes this inherently much more difficult.
Want to make your life easier and make your data work for you? We decided to write a playbook on the common pitfalls that we see which may ruin your fundraising data, so you can avoid them as you set your fundraising strategies.
This is not a step-by-step tutorial on how to use a Donor CRM, but rather a point of inspiration. Read on to see how one might lay a great foundation for data that will allow it to do more for you.
Clean data is the foundation of great analytics and great analytics is the foundation to executing a successful strategy to raise more money!
It’s the middle of winter, and as part of your school’s Board of Trustees meeting in January, the Head of School has asked you to prepare an update on the school’s progress towards its annual fundraising goal. You can hardly believe that it was only two years ago you were first asked to give such an update; you can remember your heart palpitations from the first such request just as well as the long hours you put in to meet it. The disappointment in the faces around the table after the third time you answered a question with, “I’m not sure, I’ll have to get back to you,” left you frustrated and even fearing for your job a bit. But since taking this job, in which you inherited a highly disorganized donor database and a whole new team to manage it, you have gotten your team’s fundraising data in a place where these updates give you a fraction of the stress they did two years ago, and they take a fraction of the time to prepare.
With clean data and the right analytical tools, you walk into the meeting ready to talk about everything from the percentage of families that have made a gift per grade level to overall donor retention to progress you’ve made in reactivating former donors. One Board member recalls that last year the school resolved to make plans for greater outreach to alumni, and out of curiosity wonders if there has been a noticeable uptick in alumni giving as a result. This isn’t in the slides you prepared, but you’re able to respond within a few minutes–with data that’s even broken down by alumni class year. You finish your presentation by outlining the plan to reach the overall fundraising goal by May, a plan that simply wasn’t possible to execute two years ago because the data wouldn’t allow it. Now, you’re able to approach the rest of the year’s fundraising more strategically, with a plan that includes:
At one point, some aspects of this plan would have taken weeks to prepare. But with your clean, organized database, these campaigns can be pulled together in a matter of days, if not hours. Furthermore, your data now has the power to tell you what to do and what not to do. By tracking the performance of last year’s fundraising emails by each donor segment, you know that another such campaign is what you need to get to 100% parent participation in the annual fund. You also know that one version of the mailer you sent to grandparents last year wasn’t worth the time and cost, so you’ve scrapped it for a version that the data clearly shows led to both a greater number of donations and more money raised.
Picture your development office where:
This isn’t an unattainable dream. With disciplined data management and regular upkeep, your donor database can become a powerful driver of fundraising growth.
Clean data tables with clean naming conventions can solve just about any data and analytical challenge, which is why this is the first (and longest!) item on the list.
Clean data is not a one-off project; it’s an ongoing commitment. Regular reviews and established protocols keep records accurate and up-to-date.
Data tables are the building blocks of a healthy CRM. The more organized your tables, the easier it is to run sophisticated queries and produce insightful reports.
Why Data Tables Matter
Data tables are the structural underpinnings of your CRM and any related fundraising systems. Think of them as the “blueprints” that tell you where information lives and how it’s organized. When data tables are well-maintained, reports flow seamlessly, insights are accurate, and everyone on your team works from the same source of truth. But when data tables get sloppy—due to inconsistent naming, duplicate records, or ad hoc changes—your entire reporting and analytics process suffers.
The Cost of Inconsistency
Below are three scenarios illustrating how an “Annual Fund” might be named in your data tables, highlighting the impact on clarity and reporting. While these examples focus on campaigns, the same principles apply to funds, appeals, or any other data table in your CRM.
In the Squeaky-Clean example, you see a single consistent label: “Annual Fund”. The underscores, while not mandatory, can ensure compatibility with various systems and make searching easier. This will also create fewer options to search for when creating a report.
In the Chaotic scenario, three or more “Annual Fund” campaign names exist simultaneously. One staffer might post a gift to “Annual Fund 2025,” another to “AF25,” while a new staff member just picks “Annual.” Now your data is split between different tables, and it’s difficult to run a single report to see total giving to the annual fund that year.
When your data tables are neat, well-structured, and consistently named, your entire fundraising operation benefits. Reports become more accurate, staff work more efficiently, and you have a clear picture of how each campaign, fund, and appeal is performing. By contrast, a messy or inconsistent data-table environment can lead to duplicate records, confused donors, and lost revenue opportunities.
Takeaway: Data tables are the bedrock of your CRM—if they’re sound and consistent, everything else (from data entry to high-level analytics) becomes far more reliable and insightful.
Building on the foundation of understanding clean data tables, constituent codes follow the same logic.
Constituent codes identify each individual’s relationship to the school—current parent, alumni, grandparent, board member, etc. By using start and end dates instead of deleting codes outright, you preserve historical accuracy and can more easily perform comparative analyses of your constituent groups over time.
A good example of this is with parents of graduating students. By keeping the "Current Parent" code with the appropriate end date and adding an "Alumni Parent" code, we ensure that a parent's past giving data is still tied to the "Current Parent" code.
Otherwise, if we wanted to see how this year's parents’ donations stacked up to previous year's parents, we wouldn't have any easy way to include those parents for whom we would have deleted the "Current Parent" code. Instead, all of their past donations would now only be categorized under "Alumni Parent" giving.
Assign Codes Consistently: Ensure every individual in the database has at least one constituent code.
An overarching fundraising effort, such as an Annual Fund or Capital Campaign.
A specific purpose or budget line within a campaign (e.g., Scholarship Fund, Technology Fund).
The specific “ask” or communication that prompted the gift (e.g., “Spring Direct Mail,” “Holiday Email Campaign”).
Here are some examples of how to structure Campaigns, Funds and Appeals
What this means
With some families, both spouses make gifts individually in addition to giving through a donor-advised fund (DAF) and possible additional soft credits from other friends and family. In these cases, it can be tricky to keep track of how much giving has come from a household.
Why it matters
Some CRMs make it tricky to track giving by household. Without understanding household giving, you cannot accurately report on things like the percentage of current families that have given, or the total amount given by household, which may be necessary for targeted fundraising appeals to families who haven’t yet given at all or for accurately crediting families for their donations in your annual report.
How to approach
Gifts that technically come from a Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) often cause unnecessary confusion around who or what gets credited for making the donation and how.
Many fundraisers enter their donor’s DAFs as a separate constituent–which isn’t a problem, but may create a problem if gifts from that DAF are not also credited to the donor(s) behind it. In fact, it might not be necessary to add a DAF to your database as a separate constituent at all for two reasons:
1) You will never need to solicit a DAF directly for donations, and
2) It is far more imperative for you to track donations that came from an individual as opposed to tracking gifts from their DAF separately.
That said, it can be important for some reporting–particularly the annual DASL report that your school may participate in–to track giving from DAFs.
To do this without creating a separate constituent record for a DAF, you can hard credit the gift to the individual donor then add a note, comment, gift subtype or attribute to the gift record that simply indicates it came from a DAF. Any of these can be included in a query that would produce a list of all gifts made from DAFs. If you do wish to create separate constituent records for DAFs, be sure to soft credit the donor(s) behind them for any gifts.
Attributes (or custom fields) capture important details like “Alumni Class Year,” “Volunteering Interests,” or “Preferred Contact Method.”
What this means
Attributes are great for tracking data on your constituents that don’t fit in existing categories or fields in Raiser’s Edge and that you want to be categorizable under something more specific than general “notes”.
For example, a constituent might have special instructions for outreach beyond “do not mail” or “do not call”, both of which are existing fields in RE. You might also use a separate wealth analysis tool, and an attribute with a title like “WealthTool Score” would be a good place to import and collect that data.
Clean data table rules apply here to make attributes useful!
Why this matters
There is a risk of making your data unnecessarily messy and complicated if you use attributes for data points that have existing fields like graduating class year or data that can be derived from a simple query like giving levels.
Attributes should also not be used to store data that is subject to change, again, like giving levels. For example, say you created an attribute called “Giving Level”, and a donor’s total giving one year added up to what you defined as “Silver Level”. The following year, they gave far beyond that. Now, you have to manually update a data point that a) could affect your understanding of their giving history and b) you could have derived from a simple query of total giving for the year.
How to approach
Start with the questions you want to be able to answer quickly and what ways it would be helpful for you to segment your constituent population. For example, existing fields allow you to quickly answer questions you have about giving by different constituent codes.
An effective CRM strategy includes two major “checkpoints” each year: Beginning of Year (BOY) and End of Year (EOY). Use these times to conduct a thorough data audit, which should include the following tasks:
When it comes to manual entry of new database records, be they gifts, constituents, or fundraising moves, adherence to data entry standards is critical. Some of the same principles around naming conventions that we discussed in the previous section on data tables certainly apply here, but process standards are equally important when it comes to manual data entry. This is not a problem that is limited to larger schools that may have several different people entering data; a single staff member responsible for data entry can easily cause a lot of headaches if they do not stick to the standards!
Most fundraising CRMs include a native platform for creating online forms for donation intake. Rather than thinking of these as simply vehicles through which your school can collect cash and pledges, think of them as another point of valuable data entry. Many schools build a single form, add it to the fundraising page on the school website, and call it a day. Schools with more sophisticated fundraising operations understand that, for example, you can use multiple online forms to track the performance of different fundraising appeals–even enabling the collection of data for A/B testing of different language or messages in a single email campaign.
Clean, consistently managed data is the engine that powers:
Need Extra Help?
Kiptum specializes in helping independent schools build robust data foundations that fuel growth and Apte specializes in analyzing your data and creating board ready reports.
Please reach out to kaitlin@apte.io or mike@kiptumconsulting.com to set up a time to chat to see how we can help tailor these best practices to your unique needs.
Kaitlin Windle, Founder, Apte
As a proud alum of Hathaway Brown School for girls, Kaitlin is particularly passionate about independent school data intelligence.
With a background of being a professional ballerina to working in investment banking and private equity on Wall Street with JPMorgan and Pantheon, Kaitlin then entered the nonprofit sector as a Development Director and then CFO.
Leveraging her investment banking skills for analyzing data, she started by manually standardizing board reports and delighting executive teams and board members with newfound analytics and reports.
Using these reports, she was able to help drive organizations to their most successful fundraising and financial performance in under a year. Seeing the difference that can be made in such a short time by using data to drive strategic decision making inspired her to start Apte to empower other organizations and independent schools.
Mike Smith, Founder & Lead Consultant, Kiptum Consulting
Mike Smith has spent over 20 years in the field of K-12 education with the bulk of the last decade as a consultant for school and district leadership on a variety of subjects. His experience in research and data analysis introduced him to the world of fundraising for independent schools, in which he gradually developed his expertise and the services he offers in that area. Prior to his work as a consultant, Mike worked as a senior data analyst in the Chicago Public Schools supporting a region of elementary schools and guiding their leadership in responsible use of data and data-driven instructional practices.
Mike also spent six years as a Strategy Officer with Modern Teacher, consulting with superintendents and their cabinets in nearly 30 districts around the country as they designed and implemented multi-year strategic plans to spread innovative, learner-centered instructional models to all of their classrooms. To help execute those plans, Mike engaged with all levels of his client districts, training cohorts of teachers in learner-centered strategies, coaching school leaders on effective classroom observation practices, and holding regular full-day planning sessions with leadership cabinets.
Mike has not only trained over a thousand teachers on learner-centered practices, he also trained hundreds of district and school leaders on effective classroom observation and is an expert in Elmore, City, et al’s Instructional Rounds process. In one three-year engagement, Mike trained every principal and assistant principal in nine Delaware school districts–over 250 school leaders in total–over five full-day sessions. Mike is an avid runner and officially incorporated as Kiptum Consulting LLC in October of 2023 in honor of Kelvin Kiptum’s world record-breaking finish in the Chicago Marathon that year. He and his wife live just outside of Chicago with their five-year-old daughter and a bunch of other creatures, including their mastiff, cat, chickens, and parakeets.
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