Donors

Introduction

This page will give you an overview of how you can use your Charitylog system to manage donors and funders. The following webinar will go over the relevant steps in detail.

Managing Donors in Charitylog

It is important for charities to record information about their donors and funders to ensure accurate financial management, transparency, and accountability. Maintaining clear records supports compliance with legal and regulatory requirements, including reporting and audit obligations. Donor information also enables effective relationship management, allowing charities to acknowledge contributions appropriately, demonstrate impact, and support future fundraising efforts.

There are several key tasks when it comes to donor management. The first is creating a record of all your funders and donors. Next, we can record contact with those donors so we can keep track of the engagement with your supporters. We can also record details of the donations themselves so we can report how much we have raised, and from whom. It may also be required that you acknowledge donations by sending either a thank you email or letter. You may also decide to periodically send communications to all your supporters.

Adding the record type

Firstly, we need to create a record of who the donors/funders are. You can think of this in the same way you record information about your clients. We just need a separate record type for donors. You need to go to Customise Orgs and People and create the record. You will need to add the relevant sections for things like GDPR and also ensure there is a History page where you will see all the contacts. Having a section for letters and emails can also be useful.

Recording contact

Now you have created records for your donors, you will need to record contact against them. To record contact effectively, we need to use a Project as this ensures the contact can be collated as donor related and can also be reported separately from your regular client contacts. The contact you record could actually be the donation they have given, or simply when you engage with your supporters.

Custom Information

If you use a project to record details of the actual donation, you will probably need some custom fields on the contact record to capture things like the amount donated, the method etc. For this, we will use an extension database which will be linked to the project. In the example used in the video, you can see the extension database captures the amount donated, the method eg cash, cheque, BACS etc, the date the donation was made and any campaign it was connected to. Associating the donation to a particular campaign allows you to capture specific information about how successful each of your fundraising campaigns was.

Acknowledging Donations

After you have recording information about your supporters, you may also decide to engage with them via letters or email. You can either do this immediately after the donation has been recorded, or by using the mail merge function.

Reporting on Donations

As we used a project to record contact with donors, we can use a regular KPI report. This will give you information about all the contacts you have recorded and can also be used to provide information on the donations themselves. As we used an extension database you will have to use the blue folder and then extract into excel. You may find it useful to use a pivot table to speed up your analysis.