To Track or Not to Track

Nonprofits walk a fine line between tracking excessive amounts of information about their constituents that bog us down with data entry and superfluous facts, and tracking too little information that cause vital information to be lost. Both ends of this spectrum can create inefficiencies in your constituent management process.

Here at Idealware we are slowly but surely transitioning into a new constituent database. This process has been a little odd, as we are now running off of two systems at one time- the old one to manage our donations and emailing (events too), and the new one to manage our sales processes for trainings, reports and articles, the Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits, and corporate sponsorships. For the context of this blog, let’s focus on the new database that deals with our sales process (so no donation tracking).

Before beginning to use the new database, we planned and planned to make sure we were creating a structure that would suit our needs. But inevitably, even the best plan, when tested in the field, has some flaws. And so we have been slowly tweaking and moving around information to get things looking the way we need. Here are the key things we track with our constituents:

• Basic contact info (name, title, organization, address, phone, fax, email, website, etc.)
• Relationships (who works where and who knows who)
• Touch points (we keep detailed records of each of our interactions with people and organizations)
• Status (are they active, should we wait to contact them for 6 months, are they “dead to us”?)
• Sales opportunities and products sold (we track the process of selling customized trainings, reports or articles, Field Guide licenses, etc.)
•  Upcoming tasks (we keep a tickler system going to help us manage the sales process)

How does this compare to what you are tracking for sales processes? What else should nonprofits think about when tracking data?