Donor Data: Garbage In Equals Garbage Out

Over the last several months and with our new releases of Version 9 and DonorPerfect, we had something happened that I didn’t predict- we sold too much software.

Why? Because most of our new clients needed data conversions, and though we have a full time department with dedicated data conversion specialists, it was clear that our backlog was getting too large. Yes, we hired 2 more people, but we also knew it would take some time to get them up to speed.

Enter in the old guys. Yep- us old timers that have been around since the beginning. For those scoring at home, that’s myself and Mike Sernoff.

In the beginning of DonorPerfect, about 12 years ago, Mike and I did ALL of the conversions. Back then data had to be converted on old 486’s (and even a few 386’s), downloaded to Floppy 3.5 inch disk drives, and physically mailed via UPS to the client. Many nights were spent working until the magic time of 8:05pm, when it was absolutely, positively the last drop off time for our packages. I believe Mike even invited the UPS driver to his wedding.

Flash forward to today, and our immediate short term solution to our sales ‘problem’ was to assign several conversions to Mike and I to complete- we had to get them done one way or another.

One of my conversions ended up being a poster child for why it’s so important to treat data conversions as a serious endeavor to finally clean up your data. What you want to avoid, at all costs , is GIEGO – Garbage In Equals Garbage Out. That’s why it’s almost never a good idea to use an import utility to load your data the first time- no matter how sophisticated the import module is, it will never catch the majority of problems inherent to all data conversions.

Here’s a short list of all the problems I found with the data conversion I was working on:

1. Fields missing information- such as name, address, or email
2. Fields containing the wrong information – e.g. State in the zip code field or vice-versa.
3. Incorrect data entry – The Last Name field would contain the entire name, instead of being correctly split up by Title, First Name, and Last Name.
4. Inconsistant data entry – Some records had BOARD as a flag, others had BD, BRD, or even BORED. 🙂
5. Infrequently used codes. Some codes existed in only a few records- others not at all.
6. Orphaned Gifts – These are gifts that are tied to a donor that has been deleted from the master table.
7. Invalid dates and/or amounts. Some gifts were dated after the year 2047. One gift was for over 25 billion dollars.
8. UPPER/lower case problems – Some records were entirely in upper case, others all lower.
9. Duplicate codes – some codes were used year after year, though the meaning of the code changed.
10. Duplicate records – Many records were duplicated in the system.

Luckily, as part of our standard conversion process, I was able to correct all these problems so that the client was left with a very clean system, ready to work for them instead of against them.

That’s why it’s so important to treat the data conversion process as a golden opportunity to improve your fundraising results- it’s an investment that pays off!