Day to Day: What's Your Focus Right Now?

We are upgrading to NXT (tomorrow, in theory!) so that's 100% my life right now. I expect to spend the rest of the month training my team, getting the system optimized and then setting up reporting for everyone. This is month three in my new job, and a big part of my goal is to optimize systems - so implementing prospect management, and events management and getting the team off of spreadsheets.


Generally speaking, since I don't have to the tax receipting, I anticipate this time of year being that review of processes and getting on track for goals since it's traditionally a quiet fundraising time of year for us.

Over the past month it's been working with a temporary accountant to get our books ready for our 2019 audit in April.

Hello:


We are focused on cleaning up our tables and getting out our tax receipt.  Also launching NXT.  I'm anxious to have NXT active, being we already paid for it months ago. I work in our donor services department as the Sr. Database Manager, but the powers that be are making us wait until all other departments are comfortable with it before making it active. So I just go about my day to day work. 

I'm setting up for our end of year solicitation! I know, shocking. However, our annual Gala is in November, and since there's only 3 of us running the Foundation I always find that I don't get to put as much effort into it as I would like. (A/B Testing, actually setting up packages and making sure codes get onto the pledge cards, etc)


This means I'm doing a load of segmentation and rearranging some stuff in the database (*cries*) so I can pull things like which scholarship a past recipient received into the letters.

I am multi-focusing (Is that the same as multi-tasking?)


We have our signature Spring event on April 25th and preparations are in full swing for that, AND we just launched the public phase of our $11M Capital Campaign. So concentrating on keeping those two running cleanly and efficiently and producing top notch reports is my focus.

In the lull after tax receipting and before spring events, I am taking more RE courses. A goal this year is to earn the professional certification. 

Focus is divided between Spring newsletter/appeal & grant-writing.

Amanda, yes reducing duplicates, deceased record finder and updating mailing addresses. We get a report from our USPS called NCOA and we run the address finder in our database. We then cross check to ensure that no seasonal addresses are included, especially if they are snow birds, we do not want to be mailing our summer magazine to their winter address. Otherwise, just ensuring all of our data is as clean as it can get.

Typically, we work on the audit reports in February/March. Duplicates are dealt with weekly around here simply based on the amount of online sales we get and that people forget to register or sign in (frustrating). Deceased finder and Address Finder are usually run about this time as well so clean up from there. Preliminary list for annual fund also started.

I use the automatic quarterly updates available in NXT. This is screen shot from data health window. Blue links open a report or list of names of those who've moved/lost.


NCOA summary is a 5 pg summary doc. Don't know what control report looks like to compare.

Perhaps someone who has used it more will know the answer. I've been here a year and it was started right before my arrival. I do know that one does not pick individual addresses to submit. It seems to run living records. I do not know if there is a criteria that is set for what records or what addresses are reviewed.