Tips for Newbies? #1 thing you wish you knew when...

Honestly the biggest thing I STILL struggle with is handling co-donors (married couples, for example).

​@Rachel Kristiansen  co-donors and households and be tricky! If you haven’t yet explored this collection, maybe it will give you some pointers?  https://community.bonterratech.com/households-157

What I hear from customers more often than not is that they don’t prioritize keeping their data tidy. Resolve duplicates every week. Investigate bounced emails. Leverage filters to find contacts that aren’t engaging and could be removed from your database if they have no data history. (And householding and co-donors is part of keeping your data tidy, too!) 

ohf… my OCD would not be happy about that!  😂

You may have this down already from your previous platform, but it never hurts: start early with a style sheet that specifies how you want things entered by everyone for the sake of consistency from the beginning. Are phone numbers entered as (620) 123-4567, or 620-123-4567; do you want the formal salutation set as Mr and Mrs John and Jane Doe, or John and Jane Doe, etc.  Easier to start keeping things consistent from the beginning, rather than having to go back and fix/change a much larger database.

If you include Designations options on your donation page, be sure to test the categories you set up. Think beyond just the click. For example, in test we added a Membership option for our organization, thinking it would be easy for people to join and submit payment, but then we realized that we had no way to break down the membership options into the levels we offer, so we had to remove Membership from the Designations.

Consistency is key! We log a lot of offline donations, so for us, recording must be consistent, especially if we have more than one Campaign going or use the category options on the Add Donation page. Inconsistency will lead to bad reports.