Google for Nonprofits Blog: Grow Your Gifts: Making the Most of Donor Information

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Grow Your Gifts: Making the Most of Donor Information

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

In our recent blog posts, we saw how to use AdWords to bring in new donors and learned a few tricks to make emails more effective in attracting donations from people already familiar with your cause. However, monetary donations aren’t the only valuable resources your donors provide — information on personal giving trends can help you understand your community better and turn one-time donors into active and on-going givers.
Today, we’re going to look at a few ways Google Docs and Calendar can help you organize the information you collect when people donate and better use that information going forward. Here are our top three tips:

1. Track more information in Google Spreadsheets: You can use Google Spreadsheets to easily create, share and edit spreadsheets online. Beyond keeping names, addresses and phone numbers of your donors, it’s helpful to track the donation type (one time gift/monthly/yearly), amount given and the date of gift.

According to a tip by Blackbaud, tracking the date of a donor's gift can help provide you with better insights about when your donor is in the mood to give or when it is feasible for them to do so, making it psychologically easier for them to give if you ask for another donation at the same time in future months. Check out the full article here for more information.

2. Use filters to sort your data: With large amounts of information, it can be tricky to organize or segment what you have. Using Google’s Filter feature, you can see a more digestible view of your data by hiding information that you temporarily want to take out of view. Filters are especially useful when you want to organize communications or mailings. You can use this feature on one or multiple columns in your Google Spreadsheet.

So if we want to create a filter for people who donated the first of the month (a likely payday), we would select the column the holds that information, then select Filter from the Tools menu and put a check mark next to all dates that are correspond to the first of the month. Using this filtered data, we can create mailing lists in seconds.

You can also use filters to target volunteers. If you have an event coming up in a specific geographic area, you could filter for the city or zip code your donors live in, then enabling you to email all donors that live in the area of your upcoming event and ask for volunteers or attendees.

To learn more about creating custom filters, check out these instructions.

3. Use shared Calendars to ask on time: Once you know when you want to communicate with different segments of donors, it can be helpful to create events on your calendar to remind you when to send those communications.

If multiple people handle mailings, you can create a new shared calendar. A shared calendar can be viewed and/or edited by anyone who you give access to. By using shared calendars for donor communications, you can create events to remind your team to send out emails, letters, etc. to specific groups or filtered segments. All you’ll need to do is create new calendar, add your events and then share it with your team.

We are excited to see how your donations and organizations grow using these tips and we'd love for you to share any of your donor information best practices with us on our Google+ page. Join us again later this week when we share our favorite bundle of Google Docs templates designed just for non-profits.

Posted by Katie Kellogg, Google for Nonprofits team