Donor Perfect Guidance

CASA-NYC's Development and Communications Department is seeking assistance with Donor Perfect. Our team is seeking to improve and maximize our use of Donor Perfect for development. We want to create a "handbook" with best practices and protocols, identify data updates and fixes to be made, and improve our ability to access reports and lists. Overall, we are looking for consistency and clarity in our data management. We want to achieve a level of professionalism that will ensure smooth transitions when new team members are hired in the short- and long-term. We also know that Donor Perfect has a great capacity for tracking donor relationships and activities, which we want to do more fully. We believe that there is great power in information and that we can harness that power with assistance from someone with the right experience. It would be ideal to welcome a Taproot volunteer who is well-versed in development for nonprofits and familiar with Donor Perfect or similar databases.

Potential! There is tremendous potential for our fundraising activities if we can improve our systems, maximize our use of data, and do a better job of managing information about our donors and friends. We would save time. We would sharpen our communications. We would better tell our story. And our story is compelling.

CASA-NYC makes a significant difference in the lives of young people in NYC's foster care system. Judges assign some of their toughest cases to CASA-NYC advocates, who are dedicated volunteers who help these children and youth in myriad ways. Personalized attention and advocacy lead to positive outcomes and we have many stories to demonstrate that impact. Whenever we tell our story as an organization and the individual stories of the young people we work with, we gain instant and enthusiastic support. Using Donor Perfect better will allow us to be more effective storytellers. In turn, we will be more efficient and strategic in our fundraising and our efforts to raise our profile. The end result will be more resources to support our important work and more hope and help for some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers.

Our current team is small but smart and savvy. We know the importance of consistency and codifying the work to ensure efficiency moving forward. That is why we want to create a handbook now and why we are open to additional guidance from someone with expertise in this area—being small means that we are busy. Since we haven't done something like this before, we know that doing it right will take time, especially with so many competing and unexpected priorities that we have as a thriving and growing organization. We would welcome the expertise of someone who has done this before or has the know-how to guide us through the process.

We have already started the process of documenting our data entry and reporting and have looked at some sample handbooks from other organizations. The beauty of this project is that it is a tool to be used. Once it's complete, we will refer to it and direct new colleagues to use it upon joining the organization. Of course, it will be a document that can evolve over time, which will ensure that it will be used and adapted, rather than discarded and forgotten.