INSIGHT – Understanding Insights: Turning Reports into Results

Good morning, my name is Matt McAdams. I am a training specialist with DonorPerfect. Welcome to Kristen’s session: Understanding Insights, turning reports into results. This session is designed for the beginner or intermediate user, Kristin joined our DonorPerfect team in July of 2025 Read More

Good morning, my name is Matt McAdams. I am a training specialist with DonorPerfect. Welcome to Kristen’s session: Understanding Insights, turning reports into results. This session is designed for the beginner or intermediate user, Kristin joined our DonorPerfect team in July of 2025 While she is new to DonorPerfect, she is not new to the world of nonprofits. She brings over 10 years of nonprofit leadership experience to the training and classes that she leads. She loves to help people who help people, and when she’s not working, she enjoys playing volleyball, reading, cross stitching, and working on do-it-yourself projects around her house. Kristin, take it away.

Thanks, Matt. Welcome, everyone. As Matt said, my name is Kristin, and I am a training specialist here at DonorPerfect, and we’re really glad that you all are here and joining us for today’s session. I’m doing a quick disclaimer at the very beginning of this session to help you understand or mentally prepare for how this is going to go. We are not so much doing a step-by-step tutorial of how to run a report or how to set up a Constant Contact integration, or any of those things that we would normally do in something like a training session. Today is more about you reframing what’s possible with DonorPerfect. I want you to sit back and kind of put a dreamer hat on and think about the kinds of things that you look for and what you need to know about your donor base, and then think about how you can use DonorPerfect to achieve that goal. So, this is again, we’ve been calling it more of a features buffet, you’re going to be able to start dreaming about what’s possible using DonorPerfect, and then we have this great tool available to you, which is our fundraising guide, that’s a part of this conference, where I have selected some videos and some articles that you can read, where you can start to learn some of the step by step processes of the things that I demoed today. So, I promise this is going to be great for you, and it’s going to be really foundational for how you use DonorPerfect moving forward in this session, the goal is to help us to start to move from running a report to then what do I do with it, and how can DonorPerfect then help me engage and develop and deepen those relationships with your donors. So I’m going to talk a little bit more about me, and then hopefully we move on from me, but story time, that’s me right there. I have worked in development, or in nonprofit, both in the development side and in the programming side, for over 10 years before I joined the DonorPerfect team, and one of the organizations I worked for back in the day was an organization that worked with kids who were raised in a child protection program in another country, and when I was in this role, I did not have the luxury of a CRM. We were just a scrappy little group with an Excel sheet saved on one woman’s computer, who was very nervous about sharing this information with other people. She was very protective of the database, and or her well, not database of her donors, and making sure that we asked them appropriately, and we weren’t abusing that relationship, and it was very, very hard to grow the organization without the ability to examine the donor base to understand their giving history and to understand how their values align with ours, why they give, and so a lot of this presentation is almost like, oh, it’s like a dream. If I could have done that particular job and had DonorPerfect, I, it was my dream scenario to have a CRM to do this work, because this work was really meaningful and important to me. And so, what this presentation is today is me dreaming about that, and showing you what I would have done had I had this particular tool at my disposal to do that role. What I did know about the donor base, anecdotally, this is me without a CRM, by the way, but what I did know about the donor base is I did have a little bit of information about giving history, and a lot of this came from phone calls and in-person meetings with folks, and I would say, “Hey, would you consider writing our nonprofit into your budget and giving to us regularly? And I kept getting the response, “When you have a special project, just give us a call and we’ll fund it. And I was thinking, “Okay, I need a list of. People that will give to a special project that’s an important one, so they’ve had project-based giving was incredibly, incredibly important to this donor base.

Another piece that was a major challenge of this organization is because we were working in another country, we were fundraising United in the United States, and working in another country was dealing with inflation rates of another country that was having wild inflation rates, making things so much more expensive, but the budget would remain flat in terms of what they would need to spend, but it would become more money in American dollars to meet that need, and so it was finding a way to communicate that need to the donors in a meaningful way, so that we could then fund the important work. So this gives me two ideas of ways to use DonorPerfect. Here’s the two ideas for growing giving. The first is a list of donors who have a history of giving to special projects, and how impactful that list could be. That when a special giving project came up, I knew who to call and to ask for help with something specific. The second would be to grow a recurring giving program by increasing the recurring gift amounts, we had a small recurring giving program, and they were a backbone of how we continued moving forward with our organization and being able to fund our important work, but it had remained flat, and no one had gone in and asked for anyone to increase their monthly gift, probably in the entire 26 years that the organization had been in existence, so these are these two ideas. Now I want to talk about a foundational principle of making this possible. So I’m going to read you a quote: Consistent data entry practices are key to good fundraising campaigns. Now, Who said that me and not because I’m just the biggest expert on the planet, but because when I was thinking about how do we teach about donor perfect, the thing that I harp on over and over and over again is consistent data entry, and that when we do consistent data entry and donor perfect and we have an agreed upon plan across our organization. This becomes an incredibly powerful tool, but without that good inconsistent data entry, this then becomes a useless, almost useless tool. So, how do we do this? What am I talking about when I say what I mean by consistent data entry? What’s really the backbone of that, the first thing I like to think about is it’s mostly about gift codes and how we keep them clean, and so when I talk about gift codes, you can see that on over here where we’re talking about general ledger, QuickBooks class, if you use QuickBooks campaign solicitation and subsolicitation, when we understand these gift codes, which these are the gifts that these are the codes that we assign to a gift when it pushes into our system, or when we manually enter a gift into our system, we say General Ledger and QuickBooks is where does this money live, where do we put it once we receive it, what was the donor’s intent for the designation, what’s the bucket of money? What’s the fund that’s QuickBooks and General Ledger? The codes that our development people really care about are campaign solicitation and subsolicitation. What did we do? What was the touch point? What was the point of interaction that we had with the donor that led to the gift? Did they respond to an email, did they respond to a letter, did they come to a fundraising event? What did we do to earn that gift? So it’s understanding the gift codes is first and foremost. The second piece is making decisions as a team that codes you should not be on an island. One person in your organization should not be making all the decisions about the codes and not communicating across multiple teams or other individuals, because this isn’t just about development, and it’s not just about accounting, and it’s not just about program. It’s everyone coming together and knowing what these codes mean and what they represent, so that the reports that you run are meaningful to the people in the organization. You understand it, and you know what’s going on. Making that decision as a team is incredibly important. The third thing is to record processes. Okay, you’ve met it as a team, and you’ve decided what you want these codes to be.

Well, write it down and make sure that you have it in a place that people can find, and make sure, and not only that, you record these processes, but that you review them at least annually. That this is something you look at, you look at this process, you look at your codes, and. Say, do these codes reflect what we’re trying to do with fundraising? Are they accurate with our accounting system that we have to, where we understand where the gifts are going and where they’re living? Does this accurately reflect how this gift came into us? It’s important that you’re reviewing that regularly. That’s kind of the foundational skill of today’s lesson, so let’s dive into those goals I stated earlier, and we’re going to start with goal number one. And remember, what we’re talking about is a way of thinking about using DonorPerfect. We’re talking about a way of thinking, not just about a way of doing. So, you’re going to see a lot of things. I’ll be demoing it a little bit. It might go at a fast pace. I want you to sit back and think, and let it wash over you a little bit today, rather than trying to hurriedly take notes and trying. I need to click here and click here. Think more about what am I learning about what DonorPerfect’s capable of, rather than moment by moment, how do I do what she’s talking about. We have resources for that for you. All right, so the first question is, what report? When I’m thinking about starting the process of setting these goals, I think about what records do I really want to see and what data should I use for filtering. So, when I’m thinking about what’s in DonorPerfect? I’m going all right. What do I really want to see when I’m thinking about these special projects? People who give to these special projects that you’re going to see here in the system in a moment. To answer that question, I think about all right, so we’re looking for people who are givers to special projects already, and where do I look, and where do I see that in the system that I have created that actually is in the gift codes, those are in the gift codes. So we’re talking oftentimes that’s general ledger, and for a lot of folks who use our QuickBooks integration, that would actually be the QuickBooks class code as well. The second question I ask myself is, what do I want to do with the data after I see a report, so I figured out the report I want, or in terms of I figured out the people I want to see. What am I going to do with this list once it’s generated? How do I want to use this to reach out to donors? If I pull that line through, well, what I’m wanting to do is I’m wanting to contact donors when a special project arises. That’s my goal. So I want to see people who have given to special projects, and I want to contact them when a project arises and make some direct asks. And a big piece of that is that I want to be able to access this report quickly, because this is a foundational principle of fundraising for this particular nonprofit. So, the last piece with these two things in mind, or these, the set of information in mind, What report should I run? What data do I actually need to see on my screen? And the answer to that is to create specifically in this instance, I would create an easy report, and I want in that easy report to it for it to have name, contact information, gift history, and in this instance of this particular system that I’ve created would be the QuickBooks class field, so now we’re going to dive into DonorPerfect, and I’m going to show you a couple of examples. I first want to start with the gift codes that we were talking about earlier, when we’re talking about special gifts in this particular organization I’m thinking about these codes here: general ledger, QuickBooks class, campaign solicitation, and subsolicitation. How do I know something is for a special gift?

Well, that means they designated it as a special gift, and it was put in our system correctly with the correct code telling me what the designation was in this particular system. The general ledger is just designated or undesignated, and then QuickBooks class is where we would see is that what is the specific this, what are the specifics of that designation, and in this instance of this gift, it’s that this person wanted to give money towards our equine therapy program. The rest of these codes are saying, how did this come to be? How did this gift end up showing up? Well, someone in our organization made a direct ask. They made that direct ask via email, and the campaign was specific to special projects, because it’s an overarching strategy of special special projects where we reach out directly to people when a need arises, so that’s the story of this gift, but I want to see this story told for multiple gifts, and the way I do that is by running a report. In this instance, though, we need to make a report that fits our exact needs, and that’s where. We would go to easy reports, so we’re going to go to reports, easy report builder, and I’m going to show you an example of a report that we can build. We would give it a name. I’m just going to call this test for now, and I would decide what fields on what screen are we pulling from in this instance? We are doing gift and pledge, because if you hear me here, we are talking about those gift codes, right? And that would be on the gift and pledge screen, as we just saw earlier. Then we would decide what fields do we really want on this easy report. What do we need to see if we think back to that person’s profile? If we go back to Kathleen’s profile, where we were looking earlier, one of the things we needed was QuickBooks class, because that’s how we know exactly what special project that she gave to. So, if I look over here and I search for QuickBooks class, and I like adding the description. I can click this plus button, or I could drag and drop, but if I click plus, it’s going to add that field to the end of this report here. I actually, though, what’s something really interesting about using easy report, is you can make, you can categorize things in the report to where each this little gray section here. If I take this QuickBooks class and I drag it up here to this group by every single gift will then be grouped by the QuickBooks class, you’re going to see what this means. This will make a lot more sense when I run the report here in just a few minutes, but I decide we did say we wanted contact information, first name, last name, we can add email, we could add things like address, we could ask, add things like phone number, we could add all kinds of things here that tell us the story of the gift as well as tell us how to contact the person, because that’s the point of this report. What I’m actually going to do is rather than use this one, I’m going to use one that I created earlier. If I were going to use this, I would go ahead and save it, but we’re, we are not going to use this one. We’re going to go to Reports, Report Center, and we’re going to see where I’ve created this ahead of time. I’ll go to my Easy Reports folder, and I am looking for my special givers report that I made, and I’m going to sort to see if I can find it. Givers to special projects is a easy report I made before. I’m going to open it and run it now. I then have to decide, how do I filter now that I know what I want this report to look like, and the information that I want it. How do I filter through all of the gifts in the system to make sure that I only see the gifts that I really want to see, and this is where we would then create a selection filter. So, if I go to apply, this is where selection filters are.

If I go to apply, I can add new filter, or I’m going to show you one that I created before. I’m going to go to Kristen’s filters, because I created a folder to make sure I could find the things that I created, and I am going to look for the class is not null filter, so we are going to I want to open it, so you can see what it looks like, so with the class is not null filter. Why did I choose that? What I want to see are gifts that class was selected, because in my system, if class has something in it, if someone went in and said this goes to equine therapy, this goes to group therapy, this goes to scholarships, that means it was a gift to a special project. So, if there’s anything in the class field that was selected, that means it’s a special project gift, so to make that, I go, all right, let’s think about making a filter theory. We would say, what screen or table is it on? Where is it stored in DonorPerfect? Well, that’s gift pledge, because we’re talking about our gift codes. Then we would say, okay, well, where’s the.. we need that field specifically, which is class. I go to all code, all fields, because it’s not in the favorites. I would look for class, and I would then say is not null, which means there would be information in the class field, and as you can see here, if I. Click continue. You will see this on the next screen. I’m actually going to click cancel, and I’m going to open that again, so you can see what it looks like on this final screen. Class is not null, is in our SQL code. I named the filter what it does, or what it is, what it filters for, so I understand when I come back I know its function, I made sure to share it across all users, so other work people in my organization can use this filter, and if I click done, that is what is attached to this report. If I run this report, what you’re going to see are gifts that were to special projects, so Okay, and you’ll also see when I told you that dark gray area where you categorize it by the QuickBooks class field, what you’re seeing are individuals or organizations that gave to the Celebrations Special giving project, you can see the date that they gave, you can see the gift amount, you can also see the sub solicitation. How did we reach out to this person? Was it a phone call? Was it an email? How was it collected? And also we can say they actually did the reason why they gave is because we asked, saying we needed more money for Christmas gifts, we needed more money for our graduation gifts, we needed more money for our birthday program. So this report now tells me everybody who gave to celebrations, but if I also click through, I can see everybody who is given in my system to equine therapy when they gave the I can also drill down into this report and look into more specific details as to the person themselves. With that in mind, one of the things you can do is you can prepare for an in-person ask, all right. I have this report, I can run it easily. Well, now I want to make sure I can do an in-person ask. How do I prepare for that? If I click the person’s name, it’s going to take me to their main profile here, where you can see the basic information, giving information about this person, and then one of my favorite little quick tips is to do something called view infosheet. When I do view infosheet, I can quickly see their contact information, I can see a cumulative giving history, so I can see what they’ve given over time, and I can also see if they’ve someone has reached out to them and done a contact with them, and I can also see all of their giving history all in one report.

I can print this, I can save it as a PDF, I can take it with me as I go and prepare to have that in-person call, or have it sitting next to me as I make a phone call to them and have a conversation with them on the phone. I love this report, and there’s a couple of ways to access it, but a really fast way to access it is actually from the donor page itself. The last little tip is I want to run this report quickly. Right, this is something I’m going to use a lot, because the way this organization works is we have a lot of little special events and projects that need help, because that’s the way donors like to give for this organization. One of the ways I do that is by putting it on my dashboard. If I go to dashboard here, reports dashboard, and I then go to my dashboard. What I have done is I have used this edit in settings, so that I can move objects around, and I can easily find things. But what I’m looking for is this reports tab right here, and I can then say, all right, I want to add a report. If I go to add delete reports, and I go to add new report, I can then call this, let’s call it Givers to special projects, I can go to the report, and what I’m looking for is that easy report I created. You can see all these different system reports, but I’m looking for that givers to special projects easy report that I created, I then go find my selection filter, and I go to class is not null. If I select that, and then I click save. Let’s see, I. And I go to view my dashboard anytime I come to my dashboard. Now, moving forward, I should be able to just go directly in, click givers to special projects. Class is not null, and it will automatically run that report and give me fresh, up-to-date information of anybody who has recently given to these sorts of special projects, so this then meets my goal, right. We started with the goal of I want a list of special people who give to special projects, but I want to get that list quickly, because I’m going to use it a lot. So, using your dashboard, this is a great way of taking the idea of what we were trying to achieve, and using DonorPerfect to meet that goal. Okay. All right. Now I’m glad I’m seeing some hundreds and some claps, so I’m glad that’s something you guys liked. And again, remember that we have some in our fundraising guide, we have some tutorial videos that will help walk through some of these things a little bit more slowly for you now. Let us go back, and we’re going to talk about I did already demo this, which is preparing for in-person asks. So this is where you would go to that profile and find this giving history with complete donor profile. You have this report, you can run it, and I find that to be really helpful. Now we’re actually going to start with the end in mind here for goal number two, which is a recurring giving campaign. So I’m wanting to take these people who have been giving monthly for years and years and years that started at a certain amount, and we’ve never gone in and asked them to increase, but we’ve had this increasing need because of inflation in the country where we’re working. So the overall goal is to have a personalized email campaign that, where we’re using Constant Contact. So the overall goal that we’re trying to get to is, we can see a personalized email, so you can see first name would be in there, and then we have some interesting fields that you probably haven’t seen, because they’re not going to be in your system.

They’re custom calculated fields that I created, called the last month bill amount, 8% and increased suggest and these have been put will be pushed into Constant Contact, so that then this email can have a direct ask based on their data that you have in DonorPerfect that spells out we have this specific need and if you just increase your gift by this amount for each monthly gift you’ll help us make sure that we can continue to do our work moving forward. How do we get there? That’s the big question. So the first thing we do is we were going through that same set of questions again, right? The first question, what records do I want to see? What, which means what data should I use for filtering what we’re really wanting to see are our current monthly donors, right? We know we have them, so let’s go and see if we can get those people to increase their gift and to grow with us as an organization. And they’ve often, they’ve already shown us an affinity, they already show us love month after month after month, and agree with what we do and want to support us, they just haven’t been asked to increase before. So, what we’re looking for, those monthly donors, and the way we filter and how we find these people is, we’re looking for a frequency of gift of monthly. We’re looking for a pledge total that is zero, and I’ll explain that in a minute, and we’re looking for a write-off amount, which is null, so if we go back into DonorPerfect, we’re going to look for a specific donor named Jennifer Osborne. If we go to Jennifer Osborne. One of the things I know about Jennifer is that she’s a monthly giver, and I want to show you what I mean when we’re looking at those particular fields from earlier, which were we’re looking for the frequency is monthly, the pledge total is zero, and the right off amount is null. So when a monthly gift comes in and they’re giving monthly, they shouldn’t have a total on a pledge, because they’re giving indefinitely. They are planning on giving you $50 for their bill, and they’ve chosen a frequency of monthly. If they’re doing an online giving program and they choose the frequency of monthly, this is what this would look like. The last piece that it would be would be a write-off amount that we don’t see here, but it’s important. What if you were going to say this gift, they’re wanting to turn off this gift, what they need to do is. They would, you would need to go in and edit it, and you would want to make sure that you were changing the write off amount to the exact amount that has been paid over time, and that would then shut down an active pledge. So, what we’re looking for here, the reason why we want the write off amount to be zero, it means that it is an open pledge that they are giving monthly of $50 so we’re looking for frequency of monthly billing amount is 50, and the write-off amount to be zero. So, if that’s what we’re looking for, the next question we see ask ourselves is, so what do I want to do with the data after I see a report, okay, how will I use this report to reach out to my donors? We’re asking that same question again, and the answer to that is we’re going to ask monthly givers to increase their monthly gift by 8% and we want to do this by sending a personalized Constant Contact email campaign, so with these things in mind again, we’re asking ourselves, what report should I run, which means what data do I want to see, and we have a canned report for this. A great canned report for this is pledge listing, and we want to make sure that what’s on there is name and current bill amount on that report, so we’re going to dive into DonorPerfect, and we are going to go find our pledge listing report. If we go to reports, well, first I want to show you some calculated fields that I created, just so you know where they are. That’s actually going to be on our main screen.

We’re going to continue without saving, because I don’t want to edit that gift, and I want us to see some calculations I worked on, because I’m preparing for this. Ask, we can make custom fields that are called calculated fields. You can do this in your system, and what I’m doing is I’m asking donor perfect. I often think about it like this. If you look at the cell at the end of an Excel sheet, where you’ve done sum equals and you sum up everything in a cell, that’s one of the ways that calc, that the data that ends up in that final cell at the end of an excel sheet, that is one of the ways that a calculated field can function like a sum of gifts. It can also pull things like the last time you received the monthly billing amount. It can do the last instance of something, or the first instance of something, like even the date, the start of the newest monthly pledge. You can pull a date out, the most recent thing, and then I can make it even do some math. I made it do some 8% math for me, so that it’s already ready to import into this email that we will create in a minute. So, if I go to reports and I go to my report center, and I am looking for the pledge pledges listing report. This report, when I apply the correct filter, is going to run exactly what I need it to show me for everybody in my system who is already giving monthly, because what I’m trying to create right here is an email list, so I’m going to remove this selection filter, because we aren’t looking for classes, not null, because that is not the donor, those are not the donors we’re trying to reach at the moment, I am trying to find my pledge frequency monthly total zero. You can see I created this ahead of time. We’re not going to step by step go through this, but you can see the filter I created, which was exactly what we were talking about earlier, with pledge being the frequency of zero. The total pledge is zero, and the write-off is zero as well. If I select this and I run this report, what I should see are good. Okay, pledge amount zero. It shows pledge amount received balance. So this pledge amount is zero, received is $210 The balance is zero, which means they’re caught up on their giving their billing amount and their delinquency amount, which means they have $10 coming up that it’s going to run, and that’s what we wanted to see as a billing amount. We know how much this person is is giving per month, we can see the last date, which should all be these are all active, and the reason why we know they’re all active is because again that write off amount is $0 so we what we know is that this list of 20 pledges they’re giving monthly and. Is it is active, so this is the list of people that we want to take and put into Constant Contact, because this is how we make the integration work between DonorPerfect and Constant Contact. As we say, all right, I’ve found the list of people, these are the people, I’ve confirmed it by looking at this report. Now I want to take them and push them into Constant Contact. How we do that is if we go to our mailings constant contact email, we are not going to say this, and I go to list management. What I can do as you can see here. I added a new list. I found that selection filter. I gave it a name. I found the selection filter I created for that report. I set it here, and I clicked create list. We’re not going to do that right now. I’m just going to show you that monthly givers is here. This is what I created, and it shows that 20, those 20 donors.

The next question is, right, did I need to make sure those fields, those custom fields that were created with calculated fields, were did they show up in the are they going to show up in in Constant Contact for me to use in my email, if I go to settings, and I can custom map fields that I want to push over, and you can see the custom map fields that I want to end up in that email, and I can do that by clicking create new field, and I can then link them with the ones I’ve already created, you would map a value, and you would find the field that you want to push into that you have named and created, or using a field that’s already in DonorPerfect, that already exists. You don’t have to make a new one for that to work. If you want some things to be specific to the donor themselves, we’re going to go back to settings, because we’re not going to map anything else. So, we’ve pushed in some fields, we pushed in a list of people, and I just want to show you that I did do this, and this does work. If you go into your Constant Contact, and you log in, and you scroll down to Audiences, and you look at list and segments, you’ll then see that monthly givers list that is pushed over that has the 20 people, so you found the people you want, you push them into Constant Contact, and then you also pushed in those fields. Then you can create an email by creating a campaign and designing it how you want it, so that it can include all the information you want with a personalized ask that hopefully will then turn into an increase in giving, where we get back to this wonderful piece, which is you were pushing in a name, so it’s personalized, it would push in this last month bill amount, it would push in this 8% calculation, and would also push in the increase. Suggest now that is a very fast, a very quick way of thinking about how to use donor perfect thinking, sitting back and going, what do I want, and then also what do I want to do with it. How do I use this to reach out to my donors and strengthen those relationships? All right, what I want to point to now, as I said, this was a features buffet, and there was a lot going on in this presentation. If you want to grow on what you’ve learned today, I have some suggestions of some sessions that you should check out. If you are a person in leadership or a person that is advanced with DonorPerfect, I suggest going to Donna’s session here in just a few minutes. She is going to teach a lot about keeping your system healthy, so when I was talking about code maintenance and how important it is to do the make those decisions as a team, that’s the session you want to go to. If you’re not in leadership in your organization and you’re not an advanced DonorPerfect user, that might be overwhelming, but that is a good session for people in leadership who really need to think about the overall picture of how your organization uses DonorPerfect and keeps it clean. The next session, if you’re wanting to maybe even think about a monthly giving program, which is what I was alluding to towards the end of my presentation. A great session to go to is the one with my colleague Janet, and she’s doing something called Possibility Monthly Giving Reinvented Beyond the Basics, and that’s in session set five. So I hope you’ll also consider going to Janet’s class. And finally, we have so many on-demand webinars and a knowledge base full of articles that teach you how to use DonorPerfect that I hope you will utilize and.

And you can get to that in DonorPerfect by going up to your help button and either clicking knowledge base or on demand webinars, on demand webinars or videos, knowledge base or articles that you can use depending on your learning style of how you want to learn things, and also we, what we do have today is we have our fundraising guide where each of our teachers has put in our trainers has put in some suggested continued learning that matches with their presentation that they gave today. So I hope you’ll check out your fundraising guide that goes along with today’s conference. All right, Matt. Thank you, Kristen.

That was awesome. We do have several questions here. Christy is asking. She says that she doesn’t see a lot of these fields on her gift screen. Where can we learn about where we can change and add those fields? So, I know you just talked about the knowledge base.

Yeah, no, that is a place where you can go, but I’ll do a quick moment of one of the space, the space you go to change the look of your screen. Let’s go to, we’re going to go back to Kathleen Page here. So I’m guessing what you’re talking about are your gift codes, since I highlighted those throughout the presentation. If I can get gifts to load here, I.. this is one of the things, and the disclaimers we say oftentimes before some of our trainings that I didn’t do today is these fields are available for you in DonorPerfect, but they don’t always look like this, because DonorPerfect is highly customizable, which means you can put the field where you want it, and you can have it laid out so you, the data entry process works for you and for your team, and so I personally went in and designed this screen for my own data entry preferences, and the way I did that is I went into settings and I went into screen designer, and in screen designer you can pick the screen, so you can say I want to see the main screen, or for instance I want to do the gift screen, and I want to change the order of where those fields are arranged on the screen, I can take them and drag them if I’d like. It this takes a little bit of doing to figure out how they function and how they move things around the screen. We have articles for that in knowledge base. I would look up, I would look up articles about screen designer and how to use it for changing your screen, but it’s very possible in screen designers where you do that.

Thank you. We also have Kat Clark, who wants to know, How often do you recommend that your team audit their codes,

I would say at the bare minimum yearly. At the bare minimum yearly, you could do it more frequently. I would say if you’re about to do a big event, and or you’re creating your annual campaign, your annual fundraising campaign, or you’re starting a new campaign, even to say you’re doing a building fund or something like that, where you’re trying to raise money for a new building. Sit down, a part of that conversation shouldn’t just be like what you’re going to do, it’s how are you going to record that in DonorPerfect. What do you want that gift code to be? What do you.. how you know what’s your strategy around using the contact screen to reach out to donors as a part of all of these things. What, what sitting down and having, making sure that the conversation is not theoretically just what are we going to do as a team, but the actual brass tacks of how you are going to use the CRM to track and even enable you to do that work, but with code specifically, at least yearly, if not, maybe before each major event.

Agreed, I think we can sneak one more question in here. Someone wants to know, they say they use a program called Zeffy for donations. Is there an easy way to import those donors into DonorPerfect, the donors or the gifts we do have, what we call, we can import in data into DonorPerfect from outside spaces. We do that in, and I want you to know, I do this every time I go. So, I don’t always remember. I want you to feel seen here. I don’t always remember what’s in each dropdown, and I have to literally click, and I have to go look. I do it too, and I train on DonorPerfect all the time. So, like, if you have to, we’re okay, and it’s okay to have to click around and figure things out. It even those of us that work with it every day struggle, but we would use imports. You would go to utilities, import, and you would use that particular module to bring that information in, and we have things. If you go to our help and you go to our knowledge base, and you look up import templates, you can look at importing those gifts, that gift data, and it’ll give you a template of exactly what fields you need to use. To bring that template in, so it will that information in, so it will communicate correctly with DonorPerfect. So, go to Knowledge Base and look for the article about import templates, and that’ll be your friend Kristen. That was awesome. And thank you all so much for joining Kristen’s session. We’re just getting started. We’ve got much more from day two of the 2026 DonorPerfect conference coming up next, great.