Transcript for "The Role of a Fundraising Database Manager: What's New, What's Not": Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today for our fundraising masterclass session, the role of a fundraising database manager. What's new, what's not, presented by our expert fundraising CRM consultant, Bill Connors. Before we kick it off, I just want to introduce my colleague, Ali. She is our Blackbaud representative who is here on the line with me. If you have any questions about how Blackbaud can help you raise more and transform your mission's impact. She will put her info in the chat so you can connect if interested. And then you will receive a link to the recording, and please feel free to enter questions as you think of them throughout this session into that q and a section. You can find that to the right of the chat tab. You will also be able to download the slide deck from today's presentation, and I'll be sure to include it in our follow-up email as well. Now without further ado, let's go ahead and pass it over to our expert today to dive on it. Thanks, Abby. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining today. Folks, my name is Bill Connors. For those that I don't know, I have been a fundraiser since the early nineties. I started my career as a fundraiser for Junior Achievement. I was director of development down there in the Phoenix office, and that led to a career in fundraising technology. So I appreciate your joining today and for the opportunity to be with you. The objective for today is to speak to fundraisers. So I see a lot of activity in the chat. I'm curious not just where you're from, but also what your role is. Are you a database person? Are you a fundraiser? Are you a manager or a leader in the fundraising shop? This is part of Blackbaud series for fundraisers and helping fundraisers become better fundraisers and become better leaders within the fundraising field. So the origin of this presentation is from a BBcon presentation at the Blackbaud conference that I did last fall for database managers, but it has been recast today to be speaking to fundraisers and fundraising leadership. So the database folks, I see there are many of you here. Thanks for being here as well. It's terrific you're here, and I'm hoping that you will share this or be sharing this right now with your fundraising leadership. But the I'm gonna be speaking today to fundraisers. So the agenda is to talk about the way that this role that I'm calling today, the database manager, has unfolded over the years and what it should look like today. Now you can see there on the agenda slide, there'll be four parts. We're briefly gonna talk about the way it was. Just as a history lesson, I know that's not what you're here for, but I think it's an important point to understand how this role has changed. And so I wanna illustrate it briefly by talking about that change over time. We'll spend most of the time about talking about what the position is like today and what I see it looking like in the immediate future, and then we're going to end with what fundraisers and leadership can do in order to support good data management and to support their database managers on their team. Now for clarity, there are a lot of slides in this slide deck. And as Abby said, you can download the deck from the docs section or you can go to my website and do so. I like to build slide decks that can be used as resources after the presentation. I'm purposely going to go through a lot of the slides quickly. That's not me as a nervous presenter. That's intentional. And then we're gonna slow down and really talk about some concepts on a few slides, and then we'll pick back up again. But I just wanna be clear that some of the early slides will purposely come fast and furious so that we can get through the history and get to the current content. So let's get started. So in the pre February, so the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties when fundraising software was being developed, it really was being developed for the, quote, unquote, back office. Now some people find offense at that term, and I don't mean it offensively. I simply mean what it was intended for those people who work more behind the scenes to support the fund line frontline fundraisers. The gift processors, the administrative people, the support people who did data entry, who merged letters, who would do reporting, that's the way fundraising software was built. It was primarily in its infancy for gift processing. I remember when I started a junior achievement in the very early nineteen nineties in the Phoenix office, there was one computer that sat on the wall in the office. It was that green screen on the black background, and the only thing it did was allow someone to type the GIFs in and then to generate receipts. And so that's the way the software was initially created. Over time, however, the software grew and developed and does more things. Now I'm a razor's edge consultant, but this presentation is not about razor's edge. I follow lots of products in the market. I've dealt with lots of organizations. I go to lots of conferences. So this is not a presentation about razor's edge. But in 2010, I wrote a book about this. Now I realize it's really bad form. I did go to college. I know you're not supposed to quote yourself, but there hasn't been much written or published about the roles and responsibilities of database managers. And so I apologize for the self referential material. But in 2010, these were the kinds of things we were saying that a database manager should be doing. First of all, they needed to do the technical oversight. They were responsible for backups. I remember back in the day taking the backup tape home with me in the car at night and leaving it in my dresser and then bringing it home in the morning so that it wouldn't be in the office and susceptible to a fire or a natural disaster taking the server and the backups with it. We were responsible for technical maintenance. We were responsible for upgrades. I still remember the boxes of three and a half inch diskettes arriving that we had to upgrade the software, and then the CDs that came, and then the download over the Internet. But we had to do all of that in those early years as the database managers. There was a lot of technical work. We also had responsibility as database managers for security, for making sure that the database was set up so that people couldn't delete things they shouldn't be deleting, so that outsiders should could not get access to the database. We were responsible for training and teaching the other users. We were responsible for documentation. We were responsible for data oversight. So if there were questions from a fundraiser or a gift processor, they were supposed to come to us. We were responsible for maintaining the data to make sure that it was clean and accurate. We were responsible for configuration of the database. So those were all of the roles and responsibilities that primarily were, again, back office responsibilities for the database manager. It was changing. Companies were beginning to build capabilities in the 2 thousands for fundraisers to use, but it was really slowly catching on. I'm a consultant. I then spent the next decade working with organizations. This was pre pandemic. This was pre Zoom and Teams. I was mostly spending my time on-site, either flying to them or driving around the San Francisco Bay Area. And I became concerned about what I was seeing and not seeing. And so at the Blackbaud conference in 2019, I presented again about the roles and responsibilities of a database manager because I felt that database managers or the people who had those positions, regardless if they had that title or not, weren't doing everything that the role had developed into as to what they should be doing. And so, again, I apologize for the self referential material here. I did, after I put the presentation together, find a great article from Omatic Software, and that's linked to in the docs as well. But, generally, over my career in the industry, I've not seen other people writing about this, talking about this, speaking about this. And so that's why I'm referring to my own material. I apologize. But there were three points today that I wanna make from from that presentation. The first is this. It is not the fundraising database administrator's job to sit in their office and to run reports and to do exports and to create lists and to generate mailings. Now for some of you, that may be shocking, and that's the point of the presentation today because that may be what your DBM, your database manager, spends most of their time doing. And, clearly, that's important work that must be done that your fundraising CRM, your fundraising database needs to do, but that is not the entirety of what a DBM should be doing. That's also led to the problem pointed out here on the second slide from 2019 that database managers have often been treated like support staff, like secretaries, like administrative assistants, where they have become reactive and waited until they were asked for the report for the list for the mailing from their boss. Now I did grow up professionally at a time when secretaries were present, And I would argue that the best secretaries I ever saw were not reactive but proactive. And sometimes it was interesting to question who was actually running things, the so called boss or the secretary. So a good secretary, even back then, was very proactive and actively managing the operations of his or her boss. But the point is we don't want database managers to be list makers and report generators waiting for fundraisers to ask for things. That's point number one. Point number two is to help echo, to help enforce this perspective on what the role of a database person is, I proposed in 2019 that we pay more attention to the terminology or the titles that we use for these people. Now the common term, and if you remember quickly back to my slides from 2010, even in my book, I refer to this role as that of a database administrator. But what I found was administrator sounds a lot like administrative assistant, and these people in these roles were often being treated that way. And so I proposed in 2019 that the title be changed to database manager because in most organizations, manager carries more weight than administrator. Now David, who's on the presentation today, hi, David, pointed out to me that it really depends on the culture of the organization. In some organizations, administrator may actually be a higher role than manager. And the point isn't the actual words. The point is what is the title communicate to your colleagues and to your team about the importance and role of the person in this position? Of these days, you might call it a a advancement services manager or a director of fundraising operations. There's a lot of wording, but as we talk today about what this person's responsibilities are, I would encourage you to think about the title that you give this person. So that was point number two from 2019 that I still think is important today. Point three from 2019 that I still think is important today is for us to understand that there are roles. To say that a database manager is a defined job is not actually completely correct. There are roles, different roles around the use of the database. And I've listed four here on this slide from 2019. I think this is still true today. The first is someone who does the gift entry and the constituent updates, the name updates, the address changes, the divorces, the marriages, the desk maintenance, putting the gifts in, generating the acknowledgment letters. We often refer to that person who does that as the gift processor or that work as gift entry. Data entry management. Sometimes in larger organizations, there's someone who oversees the person or people who does those things. And then there's a role called power user. And in my nomenclature, the power user is the person who does the lists, who does the reporting, who does the mailings, who does the exports. It doesn't have to be the database manager. In a larger nonprofit or in a larger educational institution, you might have multiple power users spread throughout various teams who are able to do those kind of things. I mean, it's twenty twenty six. You probably have technically technologically capable staff among various teams. And so the role of a power user can be distributed. Maybe based on the size of your organization, your database manager also needs to be the power user. But the point is that being the database manager is a fourth and different role than simply being the power user. And so how you distribute these roles is based on the size of your organization, the structure of your team, the resources that you can bring to the table, but understand these are different roles. And we're focusing today on the database administrator role and how that role needs to be done and what it entails. Real quickly, on the last slide I talked about the roles and responsibilities briefly of a gift processor. The article that's on the screen right now came out in January in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and it did an excellent job about talking about how the responsibilities of a gift processor are far more complicated today than they were back in the day. I mean, when I started this work, a gift processor's job was mostly to enter checks into the database. The thing that threw them every now and then was a credit card that needed to be processed or a stock gift that came in. Today, with DAPs and multiple third party workplace giving companies, with people making pledges that they plan to pay, with family foundations, with DAPs, with matching gift contributions, conditional pledges. The role is far more complicated, and I would recommend you take a look at this article in the Chronicle to understand more about the gift processor. So the conclusion of this 2019 presentation was these are the things that a database manager, a database administrator should be doing in that role, not just in their cubicle or in their home office writing queries, doing mailings, generating reports, creating exports. Now we're gonna come back and talk about these here in a minute, and this is actually gonna be the heart of the presentation where I really slow down. But the point up to this point is to show that the role has progressed over time, that it has gotten bigger, it has gotten broader as the technology and the CRMs and the databases have changed. So that now brings us to today where I'm gonna slow down with the slides, and we're gonna really talk about what are the roles and responsibilities of a database manager in 2026. Now the good news is it is a lot of the tech work is no longer needed. Almost every CRM on the planet has moved into the cloud, and so we don't have to worry about taking backups home and protecting them. We don't have to worry about the pile of the scouts and doing the upgrades. All of that happens automatically. And so a lot of the technical work is no longer necessary. I would argue that if it's 2026 and you have a good database manager, they should not be doing all the database maintenance work themselves, that there are bigger and better things that they can be doing for you. And the day to day maintenance of the constituent and get data should be delegated to other people who are in support roles on the team, that it is not in for most organizations, the best use of the database manager's time to be doing this kind of work. But most of the things from 2019 are still the same. And let's now spend a lot of time, the heart of the presentation, talking about what each of these items are and what your database manager should be doing for you today in 2026. Now, if you have questions that you'd like me to address, please put them into the q and a window. I've invited Abby to come in and interrupt me if there is a question that she feels like really pertinent and should be asked now. But I do plan to allow time at the end of the presentation to do q and a as well. So go ahead and submit your q and a. I may not I'm not paying attention to it now, but we do have people paying attention to it. And Abby will interrupt me if she thinks it should be asked right away. So let's jump in. What's still the same, and what should a database manager be doing for your office today? As of again, I'm speaking to the fundraisers. Those of you that are database managers, these are the things I hope you're doing. First and foremost, without question, no argument about priority. Everything else is secondary to security. We have lived through an epidemic, a pandemic, that was unfortunately defined on the tech side by breaches and hacks and access to data and threats of access to data that has completely upended the tech industry. There is no question that our fundraising databases are at risk, and this is the number one responsibility of a database manager to make sure that security is as tight and as locked down as appropriate while still allowing fundraisers to do their jobs and to do the work in the database that they should be doing. And you'll notice that there's a parenthetical there. It says security for both the database and the data. The database part of this is you should be absolutely sure as a fundraiser or as the manager of the database manager or as the leader of the fundraising department that user access is as controlled and is as limited as possible. In today's environment, with cloud based CRMs, if somebody quits and their access is not immediately removed, I would argue it should be removed before they're even out the door, before you even take them to the little party to wish them well. Their access should be removed because, otherwise, they can go home, and there's a good chance they have as much access to the CRM from home after they've left you left you than they did while they were an employee because it's all cloud based, and all they need is an email address and a password to log in. So you've got to ensure your database managers are absolutely on top of this. If you have to have discipline with a fundraiser or someone on your team, you've got to include your database manager because maybe they need to remove access or restrict access to the database so that upset user who's about to be disciplined, that upset person on your team doesn't recap it in the database. And, yes, there are stories about it happening. So we could go on and on about that. I did a three hour webinar about that years ago, but that has to be job number one of your database manager, far more important than generating one more export. But there's a second part to that, and that is also security around the data. Do you have an operation where you and your fundraisers are constantly asking the database manager for files and spreadsheets and data outside the database? First of all, I would recommend in today's fundraising CRM environments, you really need to limit the number of times you do that. Fundraising databases in 2026 are written for fundraisers to use as well. This whole back office dichotomy that I talked about at the beginning of the presentation that was a real thing in the eighties and nineties is no longer true. Fundraisers should be using the fundraising database every bit as much as you use email or calendar or the Internet or Excel or Word. Now let me be clear. I don't expect you to be a database expert. I don't expect you to spend more time in the database than in actual fundraising. That's not my point. My point is there are special tools in today's fundraising databases to make it easy, to make it accessible for you as a fundraiser to be able to look at data, to get questions answered, to figure out who you wanna mail to, to identify what your portfolio looks like within the CRM, not constantly getting data out. So point number one is your database manager should be working with you to, first of all, limit the needs to be pulling data out of the database into spreadsheets. Because once that data comes out of the database, it no longer has the password. It no longer has the multifactor authentication on it that was protecting it. You put it on your laptop. You take your laptop back and forth to home, it's in the car, you leave your laptop on the desk and the cleaning staff comes through, or you have alumni or donors or program participants walking around your office, that laptop's gone, that data's gone, you don't wanna have that security risk. So it's now incumbent on a database manager not just to be thinking about security settings in the CRM itself, but also to be thinking and working with you as a fundraising leader or as a fundraiser about limiting the data that comes out of the database and how and where that's stored. So I purposely spent a lot of time on that bullet because I think that is unquestionably job number one in 2026. Now let's let's now talk about some of these other bullets. It's the database manager's job to understand and to manage the setup and configuration of the database. So when you click on a drop down because you're putting in your contact report or you click on another drop down to move your prospect from the cultivation to the solicitation stage, That list of options is the responsibility of your database manager. And if it's confused, if you there are values there that you don't use anymore, if there are options there that you don't understand, you should be talking to your database manager about that. It's not okay to be leaving a long list of useless, undefined, old data in those dropdowns. Lots of other examples, but they're responsible for dropdowns. They're responsible for new fields, custom fields that are going to be added to the database. They're responsible for when you run a report, what gift types are included or not. Do you normally count gift in kinds in your organization? Do you normally count pledges in your organization, or do you wait until the money has come in? They're responsible for configuring the database to make sure those things are the settings that you as fundraisers and leadership want your database to characterize. They're responsible for documentation. Now this is nothing new. If I've heard people talk about documentation, I've heard them talk about it my entire thirty plus year career doing this work. But they're responsible for it. That doesn't necessarily mean they always have to be the one who does it. If they have capable colleagues or capable subordinates on their data team who can do this, by all means, let those other folks do it, but they're responsible for making sure that it gets done. Now, again, I have done an hour webinar. It's on YouTube on this particular topic. I can't share everything that I'd like to share about it, but let me say this. If you're the manager, if you're the head of the department, and you're asking your database manager, hopefully, you're requiring them to do so in their in their annual accountabilities and how you evaluate their performance each year. I'm sorry, DBMs who are on the meeting, but you really should be doing this. What you want them to be creating is not a manual for your database that you can pull any person off the street or any random fundraiser you've hired and say, here, read this manual, and you'll know what you're supposed to do. That's not the purpose of good policy and procedure documentation for an organization. All the software vendors out there have classes. They have user guides. They have help manuals. You don't want your fundraising database manager rewriting what the vendor has already created. What I would suggest you want them to do instead is to create documentation that is specific to your organization. Don't explain to me how to log in. Don't explain to me what the screens look like. Don't explain in the documentation what the software can do. Instead, they should be writing, in my view, a series of small documents that say, here's how we do this thing here. This is our procedure in our database for marking someone deceased. This is our procedure in our database for changing the database when someone gets married. Here's our procedure in our database to generate the file to send to the mail house for our quarterly newsletter. Here's our procedure in our database for how we enter DAF gifts, donor advised fun gifts, and then we acknowledge them. That's the kind of documentation I would suggest that you should be asking and expecting of your database managers to lead those discussions, to do the research, to make those final decisions, and then to document them. Moving on. It's also the database manager's responsibility to oversee the use of the database by staff and their training. I recommend basically three types of trainings that your database manager should be doing. The first is they should have a plan when anyone newly joins your team. When you hire a new fundraiser or someone to join the data the fundraising team, you need to let the database manager know right up front and coordinate that they meet with this new person on their first couple of days in the office. They can meet over Zoom. They can meet in person, whatever works for you, so that they can get the person acclimated to whatever system you use and their appropriate role in that database. Now in some situations, they're just gonna send that new person to the training resources that the vendor for the software provides, and there's nothing wrong with that. Why reinvent the wheel? In other cases, maybe their use of the system like it's a major gift officer, and all they really need to know how to do is to look at a constituent record in the database, understand the giving history, and put in a contact report and some notes. Maybe that's an hour or two of one on one with the database manager and that new major gift officer. There are multiple ways to address it, but the database manager should work with the hiring manager of that person to make sure that there's an onboarding plan. Number two is there should be continuing ed trainings of the fundraising CRM in the office. So take five or ten minutes at a staff meeting once a month and have the DBM lead a little session on when you're adding the contact report, this is how you do it as a reminder. The third kind of training they should be doing is updating the staff as changes occur to the fundraising CRM. As I noted a little bit ago, all of these products are now in the cloud. What does that mean? The vendors don't ask if they can make changes. They don't send us a CD and say install it when you're ready. They just make the changes, and then they send out emails saying, this is the changes we've made to your database. And so it's important for your database manager to be getting that information, to be processing it for your organization, and then to be coming back to your team and saying, hey, team. You may have noticed this week or the next time you log in or, hey. This new function's been released. I think you can benefit from it. Or maybe even you're not gonna use it as fundraisers, but, hey. We have more tools on the database side that we can use for you. Let's talk about this and see how we might use this as a team. So that's a responsibility of the database manager is to oversee how the staff uses and then to keep them trained and updated on the CRM for your efficiencies, for your opportunity to raise more money and to do it more effectively. The next bullet. It is their job to maintain the data and the database for proper use. So one of the things that always sends chirs up my mind is when I'm working with an organization as a consultant, and I say, well, that doesn't look right. Why is that fair? And I'm told by the database manager, I have no idea somebody did that before me, and I just left it there. Now I understand that no one has time to do everything. I have never seen in my thirty years of this work a perfect database, and that includes the databases that I have worked on and I have been the database manager for. There's just not enough hours in the day to do everything to have a perfect database. But it is the database manager's responsibility to know, I got a problem in this field. I may or may not know the cause of it. I may or may not have the time right now to fix it, but I'm gonna keep a list of all of these problems, and I'm gonna keep reviewing that list and prioritizing it and working my way through the issues in my database that need to be fixed. I'm gonna listen to what my fundraisers are saying and where they're having struggles easily, quickly, efficiently using the database so they can get in and they can get out and get back to fundraising as quickly as possible so I can fix the data. I can refine things to keep it easy and accurate in the database. That is the database manager's job. Next bullet, integration. So the great thing about technology in 2026 is there are a bajillion technology companies with all of these really terrific products. That's also the bad thing about technology in 2026. Back in the good old days, the fundraising CRM did everything. It did the online donation form. It did the emails. It did all the gift processing. It did the event management. It did everything. And then all these great companies came up, and, no, now we have a half a dozen companies that do nothing but send email and another half a dozen plus companies that do nothing but events. We even have a half dozen companies that just do auctions really well. We have new companies that do texting and SMS to our constituents. And it doesn't always make sense just to use one CRM and have the CRM do everything. It is the database manager's job to oversee and to coordinate the integration of the data from your fundraising CRM, which should be the system of record with those other systems. Please, fundraisers, I implore you. Please, if I may, and fundraising leadership, do not go select other systems and leave your fundraising d r DBM out of it and then just come back to the DBM and say, we've selected this email solicit system. We've selected this auction system. We've selected this tech system. Now you need to make it work with our CRM. That's terribly unfair, and it's just not good practice because the DBM should be able to participate in those selection decisions. So the costs and the difficulty and the work and the time of integrating those two products are a known entity before you sign the contract with the vendor. That is part of the DBM's job in 2026. We're just not done. It's also the DBM's job typically to liaison with the vendors, with the fundraising CRM database, with the other products that will work with it around invoicing support, updates, and sales. So you should enable them. They may need some management. They may not be used to doing those kinds of things based on their work history so that they may need your coaching and mentoring. But I can't tell you the number of times I talked to database managers and asked them what products and services they've purchased, and they have no idea because they don't even have a copy of the invoice or a copy of the agreement that some some other person has gone on and negotiated and signed and never involved the DBM. That's not appropriate. They need to be involved in these discussions. They may not be the final negotiator. They may not be the final signer. I fully understand that. But they should have a voice at that table and know what's going on and be able to support you on it. Similarly, with other departments, they should generally be the face of your team to those other departments with regards to the exchange of data. So with finance, while we're talking about the gift information that has to be posted into the general ledger, whatever that happens to be, with the registrar's office, if you're a school, with IT in terms of the technology to support all of this, with HR if you take employees and put them into the database in order to do staff campaigns, that person should generally be either the face of the department or in those meetings. And finally finally, what's still the same is that they need to have a good sense of the marketplace. And I mean that in two ways. I mean that in that all of these products have online communities that they should be participating in. Now some of them, I mean, as a consultant who's this is my job to know what's going on, I can't keep up on all of it. It's just impossible. But there is some level at which they should be participating in the communities with their peers to understand what's working, what's not working, to be sharing and receiving best practices and common practices to help your organization. And then finally, you know, I use an Android phone here. You may use an Apple phone, but none of us only use the apps that the vendor of the phone provided. We all use now apps created by other companies. And the same is true now with our fundraising CRMs. There are third party companies that build add ons and apps and products and services that work with our CRMs. Again, they've become so prolific that your DBM can't be expected to be an expert and to immediately know what's available if you have a need or a question. But you as a fundraiser, you wanna try something new, you're struggling with something, you should be able to go to your DBM if it's about data and say, are there products or services out there that can help us with this? Let's move on then to what I think is relatively new in our environment since the 2019 presentation. First of all, as we have moved more fully into the cloud, you do need to think about backups and not in the traditional sense, But you do need to think about with your DBM, all of our data is held by this database vendor. What if? What if? What is your disaster recovery plan? Now this is complicated, and you'll have to involve your IT consultant, your IT staff person because, again, you don't want big copies of your database just sitting on the network or sitting on the computer. So this is complicated discussion, but it is a conversation that you should be having with your DBM of what if. What happened? What what do we do if something happens to our vendor? And then as I mentioned earlier, instead of doing all the maintenance work, your DBM should be overseeing maintenance work that other people are helping them with. Another thing that's new in my experience, newish, this has been true for a few years now, is that the DBM is generally the most technically astute person on the fundraising team. And most organizations these days, there are exceptions, but most organizations these days either don't have IT staff, they contract it, or the IT staff is completely overwhelmed with a million things to do. And there are exceptions, but most organizations are not doing continual cybersecurity education of their users. And as I made a big deal previously about the importance of security for the DBM to manage. I think it makes sense to appoint the database manager as the cybersecurity expert for the fundraising team and to make them responsible for working with fundraisers over data issues, technology issues beyond just managing who can log in to the fundraising CRM. So, for example, what are your policies among fundraisers about accessing work email and the work CRM on their phone? Are they allowed to put these spreadsheets and these downloads onto their phone? Have they been drilled into them over and over and over until they're sick of it? That they never, under any situation, ever give their login name and password to anyone, including the d e v m, including anyone who claims to be the vendor, including even you. No boss should ever, in 2026, be asking a user for their login name and password. So have they have all your users just had it drilled into them to not do this? Here's an example. Harvard University last fall had a in security incident in their alumni affairs and development as a result of a phone based phishing attack. I don't know the details. I just found this on the Internet. But if the people at Harvard who have a gigantic IT staff have, I'm sure unintentionally, I'm sure accidentally, fall victim to this, could your team. Nobody should ever give this information out. Everyone always has to be careful of what they click on. And the constant reminders, the ongoing education for these kinds of things might need to be the responsibility of your DBM if you don't have an IT person who's working really hard to do this for you. Another thing that's new in 2026 I would suggest for DBMs, is that they need to be actively going out among the fundraisers and intervening and supporting and looking for opportunities to make things better, listening to conversations, going to meetings, be invited to meetings to say, oh, I understand the context for this mailing, so I can help you prepare for it better. Oh, I understand the context of how you run major gifts and how you do prospect and portfolio management. Let me make these modifications to the database. Oh, let me give you this report. Let me point you to this tool that will make the job easier for you. Again, contrasting with the model I started with at the beginning where it was a back office, sit in my cubicle, do my gift entry, pound on the keyboard. Today, the database manager should be an active, engaged participant in meetings. Reporting and analytics. Now this isn't new as a concept. What's new is the way it's being done. One of the most common questions that I get as a consultant is, Bill, what reports should I be running? What metrics should I be looking at? What analysis should I be doing? And I would suggest in 2026, your fundraising DVMs should be the people you're able to go to, but also that they are coming to you and saying, hey. Did you know? Hey. I was working in the database, and I found out. For example, I was the DBA for an organization on a part time. It turned out to be two years for an organization and was working on one project and noticed that there were thousands of people continually getting direct mail who hadn't given in years. Now that was not what I was asked to do. But I went to the boss and said, by the way, David, did you know that there are thousands and thousands of people, based on the criteria that I've been given, that are getting this direct mail piece and haven't given in years? Here's an opportunity to save money. What do you wanna do? That's what fundraisers, I think, are expecting and want of their database managers. And then finally, the technology itself is changing much more rapidly than it used to. Those box of diskettes, those CDs that used to come in the mail, that was one time a year. Now fundraising software is changing weekly, and I get the emails that I can see that it's changing extensively, frequently. This is the database manager's job to stay on top of those changes and to keep you and your team informed and figure out how they can work in the organization. It's their job to understand marketplaces and additional tools like Power Automate, Power BI, Tableau to help you in knowing how to look at your data, to use your data. And then, of course, the the the two character, word that's driving us all, crazy these days is AI. The opportunities are endless. The risks are potentially high. Who on the fundraising team, again, is probably best able to understand AI, to think about AI, and especially, of course, to understand how your fundraising CRM vendor is implementing it into the database other than your database manager. So, obviously, today, I don't have time to get into a lot about AI. But the point is by ending the slide and this presentation at this point on AI is this is the role of a database manager is to stay on top of these trends and these these changes for you. In summary, this is the least professional slide you've probably ever seen in a presentation, but what I have experienced fundraisers want of their DBMs is more data leadership stemming from the DBM to the team, especially to the manager and to the head of the department. That the direction has changed from the good old days where the fundraisers went to the database team and said, do this, give me this, and the expectations have changed where it's now the database manager who should be going to the fundraisers and saying, did you know what can I do? Here are tools. Here are metrics. Here are capabilities that we can deliver for you. So in conclusion, wanna pull back to some of the conclusions to 2019 because they're applicable today as well. You may be thinking on either side of of this coin as the fundraiser or as the DBM. Oh my gosh, Bill. I mean, that's a lot of things to do, and it is a lot of things to do. And I am not advocating if you're not doing these things that you should go and do them tomorrow or do them next week. Being a database manager is, like, a lot of jobs. There's always going to be more to do than there's time to do it. What we've just talked about for the past fifteen minutes are the things that in the ideal world, a database manager would be doing. But you, together as a team, the fundraiser, the leadership, the database manager, need to talk about what are the priorities for your team. But I would ask as it asked there on the slide on the right, if no one is doing these things, if the DBM is not doing these things, who's doing these things? And in a modern fundraising shop in 2026, somebody needs to be doing them. Final point on this, and then we'll wrap up with one final slide. A lot of database managers have been in this field for a really long time, and they grew up from this kind of old school school way of the back office approach. Not everyone wants to do what I've just been talking about today. And when I talk to DBMs about this, I say, that's okay. I remember a pivotal point in my career path where I decided I did not wanna move into management. I wanted to be a consultant and work with the product and work with clients, and that's okay. And so if your DBM doesn't wanna do all these things, if you as a DBM don't wanna do all these things, that's okay. Understand what your strengths are and where your interests lie and focus on those things. But somebody in the organization needs to take responsibility for these kinds of things. And if it's not you, if it's not your DBM, then you should be looking for somebody who can do these things. So this is the final slide other than a thank you and contact slide, and this is what I think fundraisers and leadership can do. First of all, hire accordingly. You're looking for someone with the thinking skills, the writing skills, the speaking skills, the technology skills to do these kinds of things, not someone who types 80 words per minute and has good administrative skills. I even recommend, although gift entry, of course, is done in the database, the database management is largely done in the database, to think of those as separate roles, like I said earlier in today's presentation. There's nothing wrong even in a smaller shop to have someone do gift entry who's good with rote things, who's good with repeating things, who's good with heads down data entry, and that's what they wanna do, and getting someone to be your database manager who's good at strategic thinking, who's good at problem solving, who's good at creativity, who's good at training. It's okay to separate those roles if you're in a small shop even if you have to give the database manager other fundraising or administrative responsibilities that take advantage of who they are. Be open to fully remote. If if management is not the database manager's job, it's perfectly fine for a database manager to be fully remote. I did it for two years for someone. We do need to look at our pay scale for these positions. They cannot be the lowest paid people in your team. They should be paid according to the same standards of event managers and major gift managers and and annual fund managers. They're doing in 2026 as expert and as skilled work as those kinds of people are doing on your fundraising team. Please manage and treat them accordingly. Invite them to meetings. Let them know what's going on. Ask them for input. Be be open to their feedback. I tell I tell database managers, if a fundraiser asks for something and there's a problem with it, you don't just do what they asked for. You're not insubordinate about it, of course, but you respond to them. You coach up. You manage up with your fundraisers to help to a better solution that the fundraisers are going to like. Allow them to do that. Model appropriate modern fundraising behavior, meaning use the software, put your own contact reports in, put your own notes in, look information up. If you can use Outlook or Google and do your own email and do your own calendar and do your own Internet searches and use Word to write proposals and case statements and letters and to use Excel to do some of your own analysis, you can use today's modern fundraising tools, database managements, database systems that are designed for you. Number five, make sure the fundraisers on your teams adopt the same kinds of attitudes and support and encourage them to look at the database manager as an equal, not as a subordinate. And then finally, give your database manager opportunities for professional growth. They're hard to come by, but there is an organization called the Association for Advancement Services Professionals. It's a terrific organization that focuses on people who do this kind of work. Consider tapping them into that. Let them go to the vendor conferences. Let them go to local fundraising conferences so that they can learn more about fundraising. Let them go to classes online or at the community college about other technologies they need to learn. We've not, as fundraisers, done a good job of creating a culture and a pool of people to do this work, and now is our need and now is our opportunity to do that. Okay? So, again, this could be a half day, a full day workshop. There's a lot more that we could talk about, but I hope that content, I hope that pace that we've discussed has been helpful. If I can be of any further help, please reach out to me. The slides are available for free. That's fine. I'm not looking for consulting clients. I'm completely booked at this point. But if you're if you're trying to help your database manager and you have a question and wanna reach out, I'd be happy to hear from you. With that, Abby, I have not paid any attention to the questions. Are there any questions you'd like to bring up that we can talk about in the last few minutes? Hey, Bill. Yes. Yes. Thank you so much. As you can see in the chat, everyone was so excited for this amazing content that you provided. So we really thank you so. much, and we do have some questions here. I will go ahead and jump in. So Michael asked if the database admin's role and I know you kind of touched on this, but the database admin's role is not to enter data and run report, pull this. Who should do those tasks, particularly in smaller organizations? He. mentions that their database manager is their donor relations and stewardship manager first, So they don't have a staffer whose sole role is a database manager. K. So I understand there are smaller organizations, and it may be the role of the person who also has the role of database manager to do gift entry and constituent entry and manage and maintenance and so forth. And if that's the size of the organization you have and the resource you have, then so be it. But in your own minds, as the leaders and fundraisers and as the database manager, understand that those are two roles and make sure in doing the data management role that you don't let it be all consuming and not do the database manager role as well. But it is. okay to separate those and have the department secretary or admin assistant or someone else do the day to day gift entry and so forth while the database manager does database management work as well as other responsibilities in order to get the right people in those right roles as well. Perfect. Oh, and for everyone that's on the line, you will receive a recording to the email that you registered for the webinar with. So you'll receive that in about twenty four hours. So you'll have access to the recording as well as the slides that Bill has so graciously provided to us. So do keep your eye out for that. I know there's been some questions. And then Jessica asked and, again, a lot of chatter in the chat about this as well. Do you. have any advice for how to advocate for a database manager at a smaller nonprofit, who views their work as data entry? This question came up at b b con, and my recommendation there was that you take to that gentleman who asked it, that you take the the slide deck and you share it with your boss, and you talk it through. Just have an honest professional conversation about the situation, but it's not you. It's not you just whining. It's not you just complaining, but the opposite. It's you being a professional who realizes on behalf of your organization that things are not being done, and you want to help and grow and improve the organization as well as possibly yourself. There's nothing wrong with wanting to learn more and do more and have more responsibility. Kudos for you. So take a presentation like this or take the chapter from my book or or and go to your manager and just lay that on the table and say, hey. I think we need to talk about this. The good news is for the gentleman who did this after VBCON last year, his manager was incredibly receptive to it, and they are actually changing his job and changing his responsibilities to address some of this. Completely agree. I think a lot of people here today will be forwarding this recording and slides. to their team. I. Good. know we are at noon here, everyone. If we didn't get to your question, we will follow-up with you. Thank you again for joining, and thank you, Bill. We really appreciate you joining us today. My pleasure. anyone also that's thank you. And for anyone that was, interested in learning more about Blackbaud solutions, we'll follow-up with you directly. Appreciate everyone for your time today. Thanks, everyone. Alright. Have a great one.