Do you support donor CRM and fundraising platforms?

Most nonprofits run some combination of a donor database, an email platform, an events or peer to peer tool, and whatever the website uses to take donations. We support the technical side of those: accounts and access, the integrations between them, making sure data flows where it should, the backup of the data, and the security around a system holding donor names, giving history and payment details.

What we do not do is tell you how to run fundraising or which platform suits your program. That is your development team's call and the differences that matter are about their workflow.

The recurring technical problems, which are fairly consistent across organizations:

• Three systems, three versions of the same donor. The database, the email tool and the online giving page each hold a record, they do not agree, and nobody trusts the reports. The fix is deciding which system is authoritative and making the others follow it, which is a data and process decision more than a technical one, though the integration work is ours.
• Integrations that break silently. Online donations stop flowing into the database after a platform update and nobody notices until reconciliation at month end, or later. Worth an explicit check after any platform change, and worth someone reconciling counts monthly.
• Access that never gets removed. Former staff, a consultant from two years ago, a board member who needed a look once. Donor data deserves a quarterly review of who can reach it.
• No backup of the donor database. The assumption is that the vendor has it. They protect their platform. That does not mean you can recover from a bad import, a mass deletion or a compromised account, and a bad import is the one that actually happens. Ask your vendor specifically what you can restore, how far back, and how you request it.

Two other things. If your giving page or database holds payment details, that is in scope for the same card data considerations as anything else, and the answer again is that the processor should hold the card, not you. And a donor list is a genuinely valuable asset that would do real damage if leaked or lost, which makes it worth the same protection as your financial records, not less.