Production numbers were low for development directors at a non-profit organization. Leadership couldn’t identify the problem, and assigned me the task of figuring it out. I queried each director asking what they found to be the biggest hindrance to their performance and found they weren’t able to easily access information on their top donors/prospects, without digging through a very slow database that was inaccessible from remote locations.
Production numbers were low because directors weren’t able to easily access information on their top donors and prospects, without digging through a very slow database that was inaccessible from remote locations.
Develop a tool that fed information from the current database into an excel document that auto populates data and could be uploaded to SharePoint for team accessibility.
Develop an accessible dashboard development officers can use to understand their portfolio, pipeline, and production in one location without having to sign into the database.
Step 3: Develop a template within Excel that can be an easy copy/paste solution.
Data from Raiser’s Edge 7 exports in .csv file format. I copied these into an excel document. One tab for Portfolio, one tab for Pipeline. I created a third tab that would function as the "overview" page my directors would see upon opening the document, and that had all production information.
Here, I created a v-lookup table that could display only specific datapoints in the order that would be most useful for the team. I used the donors ID tag from the database as the lookup code.
I added a few other things to make the dashboard more easily interactive for the team like search features and giving history data.
Step 4: Testing the new dashboard with the directors.
After creating a report for each director, I scheduled a meeting with them to discuss their functionality, gave them access through SharePoint, and let them try it out for a full month long cycle.