Open Forum

This is a great question! As a fundraising professional of many years, I can tell you that it is standard practice to keep donor information private. Just today I was at my local chapter of Association Fundraising Professionals meeting and we went over, as we often do, the fundraising ethics we all sign onto with AFP. Their guidelines are really the standard for the field. 

Here's the trickier part: most nonprofits are small enough that they don't have different offices for all these things. Marketing and fundraising are part of the same office (often the same person!). Our donors do automatically go onto the marketing rolls. Asking them to opt-in is a great solution to the potential problem you have. The problem isn't so much about putting someone on the email list. It's more about handing over a list of donor names to a group of people who perhaps shouldn't see who donors are. Most boards don't even see donor names. When we see a list of donors publicly announced somewhere, they should have all been asked for permission to do so.

Angie 

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Angie Albright
Director
Clinton House Museum
Fayetteville AR
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-18-2017 06:11 PM
From: Brandon Anderson
Subject: Collections Donor Database and Blackbaud's Altru

I would like to pose a question to my colleagues in the museum field.

My museum is in a period of transitioning from Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge to Altru.  If you're not familiar with the program, it is Blackbaud's Cultural Management Software platform that combines financial donations, donor relations, marketing, membership, ticket sales, group tours, retail, volunteer management scheduling, and constituent database.  A large part of the conversion is taking all of our contact databases (volunteers, members, financial donors, key stakeholders) into one shared database to be used in all areas of the software program.  A question has been posed in the past by our Marketing Department if we would share our collections donor information to be used for marketing purposes, which is currently held in PastPerfect.

We as a department have stated that we feel that violates the trust that we will not share information since we did not ask if they would like to be included in mailings, e-mails, etc.  Our solution has been to place an additional small form asking the donor if they would like to sign-up to receive information from the museum on exhibits, programs, and other events.  This form would be returned with the Deed of Gift.

Now with the conversion to Altru, the request is being brought up again to have the information from our donor files to be included in the main database with a "lock" on the information so no material is sent to them without permission.  Here are my thoughts:

1. Why have the information if it cannot be used?

2. If it is allowed to be used, the form in the Deed of Gift return will allow for the information to be entered into the database.

3. We have 150 years of donors to the collection, what is that information good for besides our own collections-based records?  

4. Staff would have to enter new donor information into Altru and still enter it into PastPerfect for our records, therefore adding an additional task to the Registrar.  

I wonder if anyone else has had something similar happen at their institution and what the outcome was.  Also would love to hear thoughts either for or against including this information in the "master list."  

Thank you all in advance!

Brandon J. Anderson

Deputy Executive Director

Chief Curator

The History Museum

808 West Washington Street

South Bend, IN 46601

Main: 574.235.9664

Direct: 574.235.9063

www.historymuseumsb.org