Donor Tools

Funny thing about databases (especially donor databases) – they hardly (if ever) shrink. But boy do they grow.

To help you make sense out of your ever-expanding donor database, we’re making a few changes to our data export format. Previously, when you exported your donor list Donor Tools would give you everything – all the names, addresses, etc., plus aggregate donation information (largest donation, most recent, etc.), plus notes, plus an itemized donation listing suitable for mail merging with year-end statements. It was a lot of information.

Today we’re rolling out some new options to help you cut down on the clutter. The new options, by default, now only export the donor’s personal information – names, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers. You can still export all the same information as before, but you’ll need to enable the options to export this additional data.

Here are the new export options, and what they mean:

Export (n) sub-attributes: Sub-attributes are things like secondary names, secondary addresses, etc. The default is to export all sub-attributes. If you have a donor in your database who has five names, then your exported spreadsheet will contain five name columns. You can control the number of names exported by selecting a value from this option. Sub-attributes include:

• Names
• Addresses
• Email Addresses
• Phone Numbers
• Web Addresses
• Twitter Usernames

Export itemized donations: If you’re exporting to a mail merge program to generate year-end statements, then you can use this option to export a list of donations for the current year, the previous year, and the year before. Some spreadsheet programs (such as MS Excel) have trouble opening files with itemized donations.

Export donation aggregates: Donation aggregates include commonly used data such as largest donation, most recent donation, etc. Here is a complete list of donation aggregates that we can export:

• Total Donations (last three years)
• Deductible Donations  (last three years)
• Total Donations
• Total Deductible Donations
• Average Donation
• Max Donation
• Min Donation
• Last Donation Amount
• Last Donation Date
• First Donation Amount
• First Donation Date
• Number of Donations Number of Donations (last three years)

Export Pledges: This option will include aggregate pledge information for each donor.

Export Notes: This option will export all the notes that you’ve recorded against each donor. Some spreadsheet programs (such as MS Excel) have trouble opening files with notes that contain multiple lines.

The new default options are much more conservative. By default, we still export all sub-attributes. But itemized donations, donation aggregates, pledges, and notes are turned off by default.

To use the new options, go to Settings, then click “Export Settings”.

If you’ve ever exported your Donor Tools data and wondered how you could have ever accumulated so many columns and rows of data, this will be a welcome change for you.