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Strategic Data Collection: What To Track in Your Org’s CRM 

Collecting and analyzing the right data can fuel your organization’s decision-making, help you measure your impact, and refine your operations to serve more beneficiaries. 

However, whether you’re transitioning to a new constituent relationship management system (CRM) or simply looking to refine your data collection processes, it can be difficult to know what exactly your organization should be tracking. You want to ensure your data is relevant to your goals and actionable. 

To help, we’ll cover three types of data your nonprofit should focus on. It doesn’t matter if your organization uses Blackbaud, Salesforce, Bonterra, or another CRM provider—strategic data collection will be essential to making the most of the information you’re collecting from your supporters and in your day-to-day operations. Let’s begin. 

Supporter Demographics  

A full understanding of the people who make up your community allows you to tailor your outreach, engagement, and fundraising strategies to meet their needs and expectations. 

Here are a few examples of the types of demographic information you should be tracking:

Age
Gender
Location
Employment status and income level
Personal interests and hobbies 

One of the best ways to put supporter demographic information to good use is to segment your supporters by shared characteristics. This allows you to customize your communications and fundraising strategies to resonate more fully with your community. 

For example, say your organization wants to grow its planned giving program. Segmenting supporters by age group allows your organization to ensure the right message goes to the right group. Older individuals will be more likely to want information about how to set up a planned gift. Younger individuals will find introductory information about planned giving more relevant.

Donor Engagement Information  

Donor engagement data empowers your organization to strengthen its relationship with those who support its mission. Knowing how your donors interact with and give to your nonprofit lets you design communication and outreach strategies that increase retention and giving. 

Here are a few different data points you can track for each donor in your community: 

Donation frequency
Gift amounts
Event attendance 
Participation in campaigns or initiatives
Volunteering history 

Engagement data is also helpful when re-engaging former donors. Using the insights you’ve gathered about their interactions, you can highlight new engagement opportunities that align with their preferences and interests. 

Communication and Marketing Analytics 

How are your marketing and outreach messages received by your community? This is the question that communication and marketing analytics can answer for your nonprofit. When you can identify which marketing strategies are most effective, you can do more of what works and adjust ineffective strategies accordingly. 

Here are a few examples of communication and marketing data you can collect: 

Email newsletter click-through rates
Website traffic types
Social media interactions
Event registrations
Text message open rates 

Knowing what content and marketing methods your supporters react positively to can also help your organization allocate its resources most efficiently. For example, if you know your email newsletter is read by more people than your social media posts, you can be confident that investing in your email strategy is the best move. 

3 Tips to Organize and Maintain Your Data

Strategic data collection involves more than just gathering data points in your CRM. You’ll also need to: 

Create guidelines for data input. For instance, standardize how addresses, phone numbers, and birth dates will be input to ensure they can easily be analyzed and updated. 

Practice good data hygiene. This involves combing through your data to update and delete inaccurate or irrelevant information.

Consider going beyond your CRM. If your organization wants to manage data from several sources and analyze it all in one place, consider creating a data warehouse.

Organize and maintain your data so it remains relevant and useful to your organization. Then, you’ll have a robust database of reliable information to aid your mission.