Case Study: Lessons From a Midsize Charity’s Donor-Database Upgrade

With a decent budget and goals for expansion, a midsize nonprofit has a lot of decisions to make when it comes to picking a new donor database.

No one knows that better than the staff at Aim High, a summer education program for middle-school students in the San Francisco Bay area, which just got its new system up and running with help from a consultant.

While Stacey Palevsky Lewis, director of development at the group, was ultimately glad she got extra help for the process, the partnership was occasionally frustrating, and Aim High paid to train one of its staff members in the system to avoid future consultant fees.

Here’s a look at the project, and lessons for other midsize groups.

Goals

Aim High has 13 year-round employees and more than 400 teachers working with the group each summer. Its annual budget is $4.3 million.

The organization had long ago outgrown its database, which had been installed years earlier, when the group’s budget was less than $1 million. The database had no connection to the online-giving platform, so staff members spent a lot of time entering information manually. Since the database wasn’t designed to track specific solicitations, there was no way to measure the success of appeals or events, determine whether emails were opened, or attribute donations to specific efforts.

“We needed to move to a new system because so many things that should have been simple were taking so much time,” Ms. Lewis says. “Any system you build in any nonprofit should create efficiencies. If it’s not creating efficiencies, it’s not working.”

With Aim High planning to increase its budget to nearly $8 million in the next five years, Ms. Lewis decided it was time to upgrade to a system that could integrate with email and online-giving platforms, provide nearly automatic data analysis, and track outreach efforts.

Project Budget

Aim High budgeted $30,000 for the project, including hiring a consultant to customize the software, transfer data, and train staff. It was more than the nonprofit wanted to spend, but the staff wanted to set aside enough to accommodate unexpected expenses.

The initial bid Aim High received was $22,000 for the whole project, plus $2,000 to train a staff member to become a system administrator.

Ms. Lewis says Aim High leaders believe the expenditure will pay for itself over time as the nonprofit develops a more sophisticated donor-communication system that will improve stewardship.

The money came from the organization’s normal operating budget, not an outside grant. “It’s really not sexy: Most foundations or individuals don’t want to support a database; they want to support kids,” Ms. Lewis says.

Staff and Leadership Support

The board supported the idea of getting a new database after Ms. Lewis argued that the upgrade would provide much more fundraising information. She created a team with two fundraising staff members and the nonprofit’s technology manager to oversee the project.

“Moving to a new database does take the attention of the development leadership,” she says. “You can’t push it off on other people.”

Process

Conversations about getting a new system started in early summer 2013, soon after Ms. Lewis joined the nonprofit. But the project stalled, and the organization decided that the summer, its busy program season, wasn’t the right time for a big change. Instead, it made small adjustments to its system as a temporary fix, finished a new website, and reinvested the money it had budgeted for a new system back into running programs.

Ms. Lewis didn’t do much research about database options, knowing she liked a particular system she’d already used at a different organization.

Aim High has a technology specialist on staff, but Ms. Lewis didn’t think he had the time to oversee the migration himself. So in October 2014, the organization hired a consultant with expertise in the new program. The relationship proved frustrating at times; Ms. Lewis believes the consultant hadn’t spent enough time in advance looking at the historical data that needed to be moved and so hadn’t anticipated the problems that would arise.

The data migration took place over 10 days in December 2014, during the group’s winter break. But when the staff came back in January, they discovered problems with the migration, and there was still a lot of work to do. Ms. Lewis and the organization were second-guessing their choice.

“In some ways consultants created more work for us because they don’t know our data,” she says.

The consultant and Ms. Lewis worked together to clean the data and customize the new system. It ultimately took six weeks to get the data from the old database successfully into the new one, and the consultant spent about 130 hours on the project. He said it was the most complicated migration he’d ever done.

“It was one of the most challenging projects professionally I’ve ever worked on,” Ms. Lewis says. “It was really disheartening for a lot of the team.”

Now, though, it seems to be working well. Aim High is integrating the database with its email client and online payment platform, as well as holding brown-bag sessions every other week to train employees to use the system.

Lessons Learned

An organization should ask several questions before embarking on a database search, Ms. Lewis says:

• Is there a consensus that this kind of change needs to happen?

• Is it possible to make the existing system work for your nonprofit, and if so, how long can the old system fit your needs?

• Does the development team have the human capacity to do the project?

• Will people devote the time it takes to do the project?

• Does the organization have enough money for the upgrade and data migration?

Ms. Lewis says that she learned about the importance of advocating for her organization’s interests when dealing with consultants. And, she adds, setbacks are inevitable.

“Don’t expect the progress of the project to be linear,” she says. “Two steps forward, one step back.”