More than a database problem

Where they started

A move to a new donor database, led by an outside consultant, had gone badly. Donor records were unreliable, gift information was inconsistent, and development and finance couldn’t reconcile their reports.

At the same time, fundraising was growing, and the number of gifts to process had risen sharply. Processes built for an earlier scale were straining. Finance spent extra time investigating and validating revenue, while development couldn’t fully trust the information it needed for donor stewardship and planning. Staff worked hard to keep gifts moving through constant exceptions and manual corrections, and disagreements over whose numbers were right wore down trust between the two teams.

What we foundAssess

The obvious explanation was a failed migration and messy data that needed cleaning up. But a new system, or a cleaner one, wouldn’t change how gifts were entered, coded, checked, reconciled and reported across two departments.

Our Data Up assessment looked at the whole picture: staff roles and experience, the path of a gift from receipt to report, and the records and transactions themselves, across more than 200,000 donor records. Underneath the migration we found decades of inconsistent record-keeping, duplicate records and incomplete household links, inconsistent gift coding, few checks at the point of entry, and no shared routine for development and finance to reconcile their numbers.

One small example showed how it all connected: a $2,500 credit-card gift recorded as cash. A single coding difference like that is enough to put two departments’ reports out of step. Each team saw only its own part of a gift’s journey, so every discrepancy looked like an isolated error, or someone else’s mistake, rather than a symptom of one connected system.

Where they were headingAlign

Development and finance leadership, together with the staff who handle gifts, donor data, reporting and accounting, agreed on what better would look like:

• One trusted, shared picture of contributed revenue
• Donor records staff can use with confidence
• Clear ownership of gift processing and of fixing exceptions
• A predictable development and finance reconciliation, every month
• Quality checks that keep the data dependable as the organization grows

The goal wasn’t just cleaner records. It was restoring confidence across the two teams.

What we builtBuild

• A Data Up assessment: role review, workflow and system mapping, and detailed analysis of donor data and transactions
• A major cleanup of donor records, including duplicates, household links and inconsistent conventions
• A disciplined gift-processing and reconciliation routine between development and finance, with clear coding and review expectations
• A development operations manual documenting data entry, gift handling, reporting and quality checks
• Ongoing cleanup queries and review routines that catch errors early, so the improvements last

What changedStrengthen

Development and finance now share clear procedures for validating gift revenue and resolving discrepancies. Staff work from standard coding, data-entry rules and regular cleanup checks instead of memory and last-minute fixes. Leadership has a reliable foundation for donor reporting, stewardship and decisions about fundraising operations.

The work went well beyond a one-time cleanup. Years later, the operations manual and its monthly reconciliation and data-quality routines were still part of how the organization runs.