Do you utilize phone-a-thons for fundraising? If so, you might be able to use your Donor Management System to streamline the process.
Courtney Goss-Pupkin, Development Director of UMass Hillel holds regular phone-a-thons,leveraging current Hillel students to reach out to potential donors. To manage the process, Courtney prepares an individualized report for each prospect. UMass Hillel, which uses DonorPerfect Online (DPO) for its donor management, uses the "Info Sheet" for this process.
The Info Sheet is a report in DPO that details the basic contact information about a prospect in the database, as well as their giving history. This information is used to personalize each call. UMass Hillel also uses the report info to send a pledge follow-up letter to each prospect who agrees to pledge to the fundraising campaign.
Note that the callers do not actually enter any pledge information into DPO themselves. They write the pledge amount on the Info Sheet, sign it, and hand it in for UMass Hillel staff members to enter into DPO. (Note: Laurie Herrick shares more information about the importance of restricting access to donor/prospect data.)
Note that phone-a-thon callers also make note of address, email, or other changes they learn during the call on the "Info Sheets," so that information can be updated in the database as well.
Once the data is entered into DPO, the "Info Sheets" are shredded to protect the personal information of the prospects. Although Courtney would prefer that this report was more customizable (it is a standard report in DPO that can't be modified without custom programming), UMass Hillel has used it to streamline their phone-a-thon process.
Keep in mind that any donor management system will have the ability to create reports for each donor/prospect in your database to help with phone-a-thons like this. Check with your organization's vendor if you aren't sure how to create a report like this.