Gasoline for Your Development Engine

Let’s first talk about what’s at the very heart of any development engine, your database.

Where are you putting the names and addresses of people you meet at station concerts or events?
Are you gathering names on your web site?
What are you doing with all of the entries from a letter writing campaign or contest?

Every name, and more importantly, every email address, is VITAL. Next to cash and electricity, radio stations run on names! Names are like the gasoline your development engine runs on. If you aren’t actively adding names to your database, your station may sputter, stall and finally coast to a stop by the side of the road.

Managing all the names and helping you strategically address multiple subsets of your database takes a bit of skill and the aid of some very good software. In this way, the database system is a lot like the carburetor in your car, helping you manage the flow of names so that your development engine can fire on all cylinders and keep you moving. At Advocace, we’re always researching the best database systems available so we can recommend them to our clients. (Give us a call and we’ll help you find a good vendor, free of charge.) Good database systems for radio have these characteristics:

Affordable. There is no need to break the bank. Expect a reasonable monthly service or subscription fee that’s less than what you are paying for an ISDN line with little or no start up costs.
Web-based. Not essential but most of the good systems are accessible from anywhere using the Internet. This may not seem important to you now, but it is helpful in a thousand ways. This often raises security concerns, but most of these are easily addressable.
Robust. Allow you to capture names and all contact data (multiple phone numbers, email addresses, etc.) as well as accurately track pledges and giving history. Also…You need to be able to add notes about individual calls or visits, as well as to be able to track the mailings a donor received, events they attended and how they have responded to your offers and requests. This is what we call “donor intelligence,” the ability to know what you need to know when you need to know it about your donors.
Intuitive. The average volunteer has to be able to point and click their way to do all basic functions, such as taking a new donation or pledge or adding a new name to the mailing list.

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