ARTICLE
What Is The Cost of Keeping Donor and Event Data Separate?
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Imagine this situation: You have an upcoming gala you are preparing for. You’ve figured out you have a few tasks prior to the event (time to complete):
- You have to send a “save the date” email 8 weeks out (4 hrs)
- You send a mailed invitation 6 weeks out (8 hrs)
- You resend an e-invitation to those who haven’t responded 3 weeks out (6 hrs)
- You send an e-reminder to those who have responded 1 week out with some information about your silent auction items (6 hrs)
- You send a last chance email to those who haven’t responded 6 days out (6 hrs)
- You send an event recap email the morning after the event, celebrating the accomplished gala (4 hrs)
- You send a thank you letter to all silent auction item purchasers 2 days after the event (4 hrs)
- You send a thank you letter to all attendees 1 week after the event (4 hrs)
- You send a e-solicitation to all non-attendees after your Board says they will match another $10K of donations from non-attendees (6 hrs)
This is a total of 48 hours just dedicated to emails and letters around the event.
If you have your donor data separated from your event data, which is also separated from your email system, putting together each of these steps could be a nightmare. It can be hard to quantify the dollars wasted on having the inefficiencies of multiple disparate systems.
If the employee responsible for executing each of these steps is paid $40,000 a year then they make roughly $20 an hour. (50 weeks * 40 hours = 2000 hours; $40,000/$2,000 = $20).
If they are responsible for helping to raise $250,000 a year through four events, they should be raising roughly $125 an hour (200 hours; $250,000/$2,000 = $125). That means that the actual costs for the employee is $20/hr of hard costs plus the opportunity costs of $125/hr, for a total cost of $145/hr.
By moving to a system that is more integrated you could drop down the time of processing each of these steps by multiple hours.
Let’s say an integrated system will save you half the time for each of these steps, dropping from 48 to 24 hours. That brings the hard costs down by $480, and the opportunity costs down to $3,000. That’s a savings of almost $3,500 for this one event. If you do this four times a year, that’s a savings of almost $14,000.
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Spread this type of improvement in efficiency over events, annual appeals, donation thank you letters and end of year tax receipts, the savings could be significant.
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