Board of Directors Reporting and Direct Access to Database

Theodore VanPatten

I am looking to revamp our Board of Directors reporting, and a board member asked for direct access to our database. I have never given a board member direct access. Can anyone share if I should, and also, how much donor information should I share? For example, in the past, I would only include name, Amount, Date, and Purpose in a spreadsheet. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thank you Ted

JoAnn Strommen

@Theodore VanPatten Welcome to the BB Community forums.

Access to non-staff would be determined by your org's database and privacy policies.
Neither of the orgs I have worked for gave board members access to the db. Financial reports are based on funds, not individual donors. I know some do give access.

What policies do you have? Any that would govern this? While there may be instances that a board member needs to know financial information, do they need to know the donor's name? Donors also have a right to privacy.

Our database policies for the university and foundation state that volunteers have access only to contact information provided by exported spreadsheet from RE. Per your profile you have quite a long experience in fundraising world. I think you need to consult your org staff leadership and then board to set a policy. If names and amounts are made available, IMO that should be clear to donor when making gift as well.

Theodore VanPatten

@JoAnn Strommen
Thank you, JoAnn; I have been doing this for a long time and have never given direct access to Board members. And as you stated, we did reports that were distributed. The only list we would give is a monthly donor list that includes name, amount, date, & Purpose. I am going to recommend that is all we do here. I just started a short time ago and could not find any documentation, but I know no previous board member had direct access.. Thank you for your response. I am updating our Gift Acceptance Policy, which has no direct access to the board member mentioned.

Alex Wong

@Theodore VanPatten
We do not give access to RE NXT outside of staff that works in the org.

For national/executive board member, we create Power BI with no PII info that can be accessed by them to see information that we allow them to see.

Theodore VanPatten

@Alex Wong Thanks Alex

Dariel Dixon

Peace @Theodore VanPatten, welcome back! I would ask more questions. As a board member, have they already signed a confidentiality agreement? I would lean on that. However, if there is a clear business need, then I would give only the most restricted of access available, just to the point of business need.

Theodore VanPatten

@Dariel Dixon Thanks, Dariel. They have signed a confidentiality agreement and are involved in Give and Get fundraising goals. What I have done in the past is print a donor list, and the executive would just pass it around at the Board Meeting as an agenda item for the Gift Acceptance Policy. The policy was, how can they accept gifts (checks, CC, etc.) without seeing them? But there is no bio; only one copy is passed around during the agenda item. Anyway, I think that is what I am going to suggest.

Steve Birnbaum

@Theodore VanPatten Assuming this is a board of directors with fiduciary responsibility for the organization and they have agreed to your institutional data governance policies, you may want to consider provisioning a reporting portal based on a data warehouse. This would allow board members to self-service read-only reports, without the overhead of giving them full system access (training, licensing, etc.)

Data Moose provides turnkey SKY API-based data warehousing for NXT products, and it wouldn't be that complicated to use this data for self-service Board reports. Feel free to contact me offline for more information - steve@datamoose.org

Diane Karau

@Theodore VanPatten
Very Interesting. We do this thing called the “Red Clipboard Report.” - sort of a gift list that gets passed around.