Is your Bloomerang CRM hiding things from you?
The hidden data problems affecting your fundraising (and how to find them)
Your Bloomerang CRM database is supposed to be your fundraising team's reliable source for donor information and giving history, but if you are like most organizations, your CRM has probably been quietly accumulating problems that you can't see.
Most small- and mid-sized nonprofits are running lean with development staff juggling a never-ending to-do list, and CRM issues are easy to push to the back burner. The good news is that once you know what to look for, most of these problems are fixable.
The Problems You Probably Cannot See
Duplicate records are the most common culprit, and they are rarely as obvious as two entries with the same name. A donor who gave through your website, then mailed a check, then registered for your event might exist as three separate records in your system, each with a different email address and partial giving history. Not only does that mean your dashboard is flashing an artificually high number of lapsed donors, but your acknowledgment and appeal letters might go out twice, and your major gift officer has no idea that this person has actually given $4,000 over the past three years.
Uncoded transactions are the second issue I see constantly. If you've run a report and found that a significant percentage of your gifts have no appeal code, no campaign attribution, or no fund designation, you're not alone. In one recent database assessment, I found over 14,000 uncoded transactions in a single system. That means the organization couldn't tell which appeals were working and which were not, because the data to answer that question didn't exist. To grow your revenue, you need to be able to look at what's working and what's not, and coded transactions are the best way to do that.
Then there are the softer problems that erode your database's usefulness over time: email addresses that bounced months ago but were never cleaned, constituent records with no giving history that clutter every search, addresses with mutiple family members that receive three copies of each mailing.
What a Database Health Assessment Actually Covers
When I conduct a health assessment, I am looking at five core areas:
Constituent completeness - How many of your records have the basic information you need to communicate with donors? Are email addresses current? Are mailing addresses valid? Are phone numbers populated?
Transaction coding - What percentage of your gifts are properly attributed to appeals, campaigns, and funds? Can you actually answer the question "how much did our spring appeal raise?"
Duplicate risk - How many likely duplicate clusters exist in your system, and how did they get there? Are they from list imports, event registrations, or manual entry errors?
Acknowledgment compliance - Are your thank-you letters going out within 48 hours of receiving a gift, as fundraising best practices recommend? Are they going out at all?
Taxonomy structure - Do your appeal codes, campaign codes, and fund designations follow a consistent naming convention, or have they grown organically over the years into something that no one on your current team fully understands?
Why This Matters More Than You Think
A database with hidden problems creates inefficiency, but, most importantly, it costs you money.
Personalized, consistent stewardship of your existing donors is more profitable than investment in identifying new donors, and clean data in your Bloomerang CRM is the key.
When you can't segment your donor base accurately, you send generic appeals that perform worse than targeted ones. When you do not know who your repeat donors are, you treat first-time givers and loyal supporters the same way (which is one of the most common reasons donors lapse!)
The fix almost always starts with understanding where you stand. A health assessment gives you a clear scorecard, a prioritized action plan, and the confidence of knowing whether the database you are relying on is actually as reliable as you think it is. If you have never had an independent audit of your Bloomerang database, it is worth doing, and the results might surprise you.
Want to find out what your database is really telling you? Email Andrea at andrea@albertoashbyconsulting.com
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