In Defense of Paper Filing Systems

21 Apr In Defense of Paper Filing Systems

22 April 2024

By David Allen, Development for Conservation

My topic today is donor files, but I want to start by acknowledging that today is Earth Day. I don’t know about you, but it feels to me that our work protecting land and caring for Nature is becoming ever more important.

Keep up the good work. Happy Earth Day!

Let’s say you’re a relative newcomer to the land trust. You screw up your courage and get a meeting, over lunch, with a donor you understand to be a key opinion leader. Turns out she was a founding director, served 16 years on the board including 6 years as Chair. In 2002, she donated 200 acres as a preserve including nearly a quarter mile of river frontage. She loves birding and only gives once each year, in August, and gets mildly irritated when the land trust sends solicitations to her at other times of the year. The land trust is in her will.

Most of that information should be available to you before your meeting. Where will you find it?

Unfortunately, all too often, the information you need is in the heads of your predecessors, some of whom aren’t on the staff or board any longer. Some of the information is in the database – but the organization changed systems in 2015, and not all the information from the old system translated. The land donation wasn’t even recorded in the old spreadsheet system. That information is in the project files – assuming you think to look there. Her board service is recorded in the board meeting minutes, which go back to the beginning in carefully labeled three-ring binders. A Board Director sent her a handwritten card when he found out about her will, but no one copied the card and the fact was never recorded otherwise. And your predecessor just “remembered” to suppress her name from the solicitation each fall.

Sound familiar? Frankly, I think we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. In our zeal to reduce paper and digitize everything, we have made it harder to “know” anything about our donors. I think there should be a place where you can go and relatively quickly learn the key points about a donor and their entire relationship with the organization. I think that place is in a paper file in a file cabinet marked “Donor Records.”

In my career, I have worked in three different state offices for The Nature Conservancy, and one office for Sand County Foundation. In each case, I had significant responsibility for raising money and coming quickly up to speed on the donor base was important. In each case, the donor files became my daily reading assignment. And not just their giving history, either. But clues about why they care who they’ve gotten close to.

Land Trust work is “in perpetuity;” none of us will make it that long, so what’s in our head will not be good enough. Fundraising is about building relationships between the donor and the organization. Donor files are important because they chronicle that relationship. Information needs to be written down, notes and thoughts captured, so that those who follow can come quickly up to speed in our wake. Electronic filing systems are fine until they are dependent on outdated software and scatter the relevant parts and pieces of the story all over the internet. A reader (like me!) should be able to pick up a file and fully understand the history and status of that relationship at any given moment in time.

This Spring, take a couple of days to clean up (or create!) your own filing system. It’s a job no one likes, but everyone appreciates eventually. So don’t put it in the When-I-Have-Time pile – because you never will. Make a priority and do it between now and Memorial Day.

At the very least, your donor files should include copies of everything they send to you. I remember one donor who saved his ads and junk mail. He wrote me long letters in the margins, waxing eloquent about what he loved most about protecting land. Reading them – just looking at them – told us far more about him as a person than we would have ever been able to capture electronically.

Do you have to have a donor file for every member? NO, but establish and follow a simple trigger policy so it doesn’t become arbitrary. For example, a threshold contribution amount, say a single gift of $250 or more, might be the signal to create a donor file. My preferred trigger is correspondence from the member. As soon as they send something to you – an email, letter, note, or card – set up a donor file and start tracking the relationship.

Here are some other ideas that I like:

♦ Color code your donor files. Choose a color that is not used anywhere else in your office. The easier it is to identify donor files, the more likely it is that they will return to the file cabinet and stay organized. (At TNC, we used purple.)

♦ Color code research information. Staple it together in a contained packet and always have it filed in the front of the donor file.

♦ Set up a cross-reference system. To avoid copying a letter from Tom Miller to both the Miller, Tom file and the XYZ Investments file, choose one, and file a dummy in the other place. In general, file individual donor information with the donor name, and file grant officer information with the corporate/foundation name.

♦ Include a photo. On field trips and at special events, take a camera and snap photos of as many donor/members as you can. In the donor files include a (one) photo of the donor in their file. Clip it to the inside front cover of the file for easy reference.

♦ Create two files for corporations and foundations – the second should be a different color. Into this second file, throw the annual reports, institutional brochures, and/or any information that will be updated over time. When you get the new material, replace the older version in the file.

Over time, two additions to the files will save time for those renewing the files. First, create a data sheet with all known addresses and other contact information, birth date(s), giving history, typical renewal month, and any special interests or connections with the organization. Second, summarize a basic chronology with the high points of the relationship. Both of these documents will be replaced by new information over time, so an annual review would be appropriate and useful.

If all this seems daunting, and it’s hard to get started, start with your Board members. Set up a file for each one, copy and file all correspondence you may have stored in your computer over time, and make copies of everything they may have sent to you. Write a paragraph detailing what you know about their financial position, gifts to the organization, and specific interests. Include photos if you have them and find a place in the file cabinet. Voila! You have a start.

There is some debate about whether electronic filing is an appropriate substitute for paper files. Electronic files, for those who are religious about scanning and have a good system for finding things, have some strong advantages. That they can be searched quickly is a great benefit. They also take up less room and use less paper resources. Even more importantly, they are easily and efficiently backed up and stored off-site – a huge advantage in a disaster.

But my answer is still NO, electronic filing is not an acceptable substitute. Call me old-fashioned, but I get a sense of the donor relationship from the “heft” of the file, the dog-eared pages, the notes scribbled by various readers over time, and the nature of the donor’s paper or cards that I just don’t get from the computer screen. Use electronic filing as a redundant system – for searches and backups – but keep all the cards and paper they send you in a file cabinet all the same.

If you have tips and/or tricks you have used, or if you feel compelled to rush to the defense of electronic filing systems, do let me know.

Cheers and Have a Good Week!

-da

PS: Your comments on these posts are welcomed and warmly requested. If you have not posted a comment before, or if you are using a new email address, please know that there may be a delay in seeing your posted comment. That’s my SPAM defense at work. I approve all comments as soon as I am able during the day.

Photo by courtesy of NASA