Seven spreadsheets and a card index
Your supporter records are spread across a donors spreadsheet started by a founder, an events list, a newsletter list in the email tool, a volunteers sheet, a Gift Aid sheet and the treasurer's own record of standing orders. There is also a card index of long-standing supporters that one trustee keeps up to date by hand.
Everyone agrees you need a proper database. The question is always how. The data is inconsistent, with dates in three formats and addresses in one cell. Nobody can stop work for a month to clean it, and there is real worry about losing years of history or getting preferences wrong in the move.
Why the move keeps being postponed
The move is postponed because the risk and effort are front-loaded, and the benefits come later.
- Data is spread across files with different columns and conventions.
- The same supporter appears in several sheets with small differences.
- Gift histories and declarations are held in ways that do not map cleanly to a database.
- Nobody is sure which database suits a charity of your size.
- Staff fear a period where neither the old nor the new system is reliable.
The honest answer is that the hard part is the data, not the database. Choosing a CRM is a smaller decision than people expect.
What staying on spreadsheets costs
Duplicate and conflicting records lead to supporters being contacted wrongly or not at all. Reporting takes days. Only one or two people understand how the sheets fit together, and they cannot take leave without worrying. Gift Aid, preferences and thank-yous suffer because none of the sheets can do what a database does.
Every year you wait, the data grows and gets a little harder to move.
How we move your supporter records
- We gather every sheet and list, and profile them: columns, formats, gaps and likely duplicates, so you can see the state of the data before deciding anything.
- We help you choose a database that suits your size and budget, which may be a charity CRM such as Donorfy or Beacon, or Salesforce if you need more flexibility, and we say plainly if a simpler option would do.
- We clean the data with scripts, not by hand: standardising dates, splitting addresses, fixing postcodes and normalising names.
- Likely duplicates across sheets are grouped and put in front of a person to confirm merges, with preferences following the more restrictive choice.
- Gifts, declarations, preferences and notes are mapped to the new database's structure, with the source file and row kept on each record for tracing.
- A trial load goes into a test copy, and your team checks a sample of records against the old sheets, including the awkward ones.
- After the final load, the old sheets are kept read-only for a period you choose, so any question can be answered from the source.
| Check | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Counts reconciled from each sheet | Nothing silently dropped |
| Sample of long-standing supporters checked | History carried across correctly |
| Preferences compared record by record | No one contacted against their wishes |
| Gift totals by year compared | Income history intact |
The old spreadsheets are not deleted as part of the move. They stay available read-only until you are confident.
After the move
Supporters have one record each, with gifts, declarations and preferences together. The treasurer's standing order list becomes a report rather than a separate sheet. The trustee with the card index can see everything in the database, and the index can retire when they are ready.
New staff and volunteers learn one system, and reports that took days take minutes.
Is your charity ready to move?
- Supporter records live in several spreadsheets.
- The same person appears in more than one list.
- Only one person understands how the sheets fit together.
- You have put off a database because of the data clean-up.
- Reporting on supporters takes days.