Ask a small nonprofit team what they need most and the answer is almost always “more donors.”
Fundraising strategist Danielle Locke hears it constantly, and after more than two decades in the field she has a gentle counter-argument: you probably have more donor potential than you can currently see easily. The supporters are already on your list. Your records just make them hard to find.
That was the heart of our August 2026 webinar, where Danielle joined 4aGoodCause founder Ronald Pruitt for an hour on donor data. They discussed the small errors that quietly cost nonprofits money and goodwill, the habits that prevent them, and what Danielle calls the “hidden gold” sitting in nearly every database more than a couple of years old.
Watch the full video
In this webinar, Danielle discusses how the quality of your donor data shapes everything downstream: retention, stewardship, major gift work, and the size of the asks you can credibly make.
Learn how to spot the errors already sitting in your system, capture the details that actually build relationships, and set up tags and reports so you can find the right people when you need them.
In this session, you’ll explore:
- The most common donor data errors, and why some of them cost far more than postage
- Why “10,000 profiles” and “300 donors” are two very different numbers, and why your board needs to know that
- What to capture about a supporter beyond name, address, and gift amount
- How tags, stewards, and cultivation stages turn a list into a fundraising plan
- The weekly habits that keep records clean without a big cleanup project
- Where wealth screening genuinely helps, and where it should not be trusted
5 top takeaways from the webinar
- Bad donor data costs relationships before it costs money. Danielle’s examples are the kind that make you wince: A birthday card sent to a spouse who has passed away. A board member of ten years, recently rolled off, invited to a new donor reception. These are signals to the donor that you do not know or do not value what they built with you.
- Profiles are not donors, and your board needs to understand the difference. Danielle regularly sees organizations with 10,000 records and 300 actual donors. Without tags or some other way to separate constituent types, you cannot give your board members an accurate headcount.
- Enter data with the report you will need later in mind. Danielle’s first question when a nonprofit sets up or cleans up a system is: How am I going to get this back out? Decide what you will want to pull, then structure the input so that it is possible.
- Tags are how you find people again. Notes are wonderful and you should write them. But notes are not searchable and you cannot build a report from them. Tags, or lists, depending on your system, are what let you say: Here are the 50 people who have told us they care about early childhood programming. Mail those 50 instead of 5,000. Cheaper for you, and far more relevant for the donor.
- An hour a week beats an annual cleanup project. Danielle’s most practical advice is to fix records while you are already in them. If you are entering a gift or pulling up a profile before a coffee, scan it and correct what is wrong. She compares it to tidying a house: do it daily and it is nothing, wait a month and everyone dreads it.
🤯 Did you know? Recurring donations on the 4aGoodCause platform average $55 per month, compared to $28 per month industry-wide. Clean records make potential recurring supporters easier to spot before you ask, and easier to keep afterward. See how the 4aGC Monthly Giving Toolkit helps you build a base of recurring donors.
Can your donor data pass this test?
Danielle closed the session with an exercise you can run with your team, your board, or by yourself in 20 minutes.
Open your donor CRM and try to answer:
- Can you pull a list of everyone who gave last year but not this year?
- Can you name your top 25 individual donors?
- Which supporters have given three or more years running? (Those are your monthly giving prospects, sitting right there.)
- How far back does your giving history go?
- Has your board given 100%?
- Search two or three common last names. How many duplicates come back?
If any of those take longer than a few minutes, or you are not sure they are even possible in your system, you have found your starting point.
Two habits Danielle recommends alongside the audit:
- First, run a weekly report of every donation that came in, however few, and actually read it: names, amounts, programs. The brain is an excellent pattern-finder, and you will start noticing that this donor shares a last name with that one, or that a gift arrived the same week their employer announced a match.
- Second, set Google Alerts on your donors, board members, and prospects, so you hear about the promotion or the award in time to say congratulations.
Where does wealth screening actually fit in the process?
Ronald asked the question a lot of small shops have: This data is public, but is it accurate, and what do you do with it?
Danielle answered that screening is a prioritization tool, not a verdict. Accuracy depends entirely on what you feed it. A common name with no address attached returns noise. Add an employer, a spouse’s name, and a mailing address and confidence rises considerably. If you have no address at all, you cannot screen the record (which is one more argument for complete data).
The signal Danielle finds most useful: a supporter giving $5,000 to an organization like yours and $100 to you. That’s an awareness or relationship problem, and that’s something you can do something about.
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About Danielle Locke
Danielle Locke, CAP®, MPA, believes there is more generosity in the world than most people realize. Founder and CEO of Locke Step Partners, she helps nonprofit leaders bring bold visions to life through practical fundraising strategy, stronger donor relationships, and sustainable systems that replace chaos with clarity. She has worked with institutions as large as the Cleveland Clinic and with organizations small enough that she built her own desk, and she hosts the Fundraising Unfiltered podcast. Connect with Danielle on LinkedIn.
