Good fundraising is built on relationships with donors.
To set yourself up for the most success, you need to have a donor-tracking software in place to help you gather and store donor and gift information. There are lots of different software programs out there, all the way from free to very expensive.
Idealware has a great article in their latest newsletter detailing the reasons why you should not use Excel for this purpose.
Excel is a wonderful tool for crunching numbers. It’s just not the best tool for tracking donor info. The article points out “it’s not designed to handle relationships between data, such as when one record (like a donor) needs to link to several other records (like gifts). And it doesn’t provide a wide variety of features that make tracking efficient and less error prone.”
If you don’t have anything else, Excel will at least let you capture names and addresses. But as your fundraising program grows, you need to look at something that is meant for tracking donor information.
Read the article for yourself at http://www.idealware.org/articles/Excel_isnt_database.php.
What software do you use? Do you love it? Inquiring minds want to know. Click on the comment link and share with us all.
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