This case study highlights how good things can happen when departments come together. Learn about how our client Wesley was able to streamline their gift entry process through training, trust, and developing automatic data files.

I am so excited to share that Sentinel Consulting will be participating as an Exhibit sponsor at this year’s AFP ICON! Being one of the largest fundraising conferences in the world it can be daunting. You might be asking yourself the question; How do I get the most out of ICON? Here are some of my tips on how to best prepare yourself for this amazing 3 days of learning, engagement, and networking!

As charities, we tend to see our biggest volume of gifts coming in through Thanksgiving and Christmas. However, for the Chinese Canadian community, there is no holiday more important and universally celebrated than the Chinese Lunar New Year. Learn how to appropriately celebrate this holiday with your community and better engage donors and supporters.

We all have New Year's resolutions we want to accomplish. One of the big ones for us fundraisers is cleaner data. Learn 5 helpful tips that will help you design the queries you need to keep your resolution!

If you have returned to the office, post-holidays, and you have piles (or boxes) of returned mail, does your heart sink? Mine does! Let’s talk about ways to tidy up your mailing data so your next mailing goes off with out a hitch!

An endless number of applications, databases, and services are available to non-profits. All these choices can only muddy the waters for many non-profit decision-makers. For many in the non-profit space, how do you make heads or tails about what service, application or training to take on? We want to teach you how the team at Sentinel Consulting develops solutions for our clients. Make decisions like a pro.

Let’s discuss some of the details on how to set up and review your stewardship plan, define useful donor profiles, and the contact points your stewardship plan needs to succeed. In this article learn more about categorizing your donors, leveraging stewardship and creating donor journeys that will lead to true partnership.

Now that Giving Tuesday is behind us. All that's left is the final push of end-of-year asks. But wait, for data folks, the next big wave is tax receipt season. Learn and review some of the key things to look out for when preparing your end-of-year receipts.

Something we often look past during this busy time of year is Appreciation. What are we doing to thank our donors who generously gave to our organizations this year? In this article learn about some of the important things to consider in a Stewardship Plan, the checklist method, and how to go one step beyond.

Reporting is an important tool for any Development Office. However, it is particularly important to those with a Major Gifts focus because of how many different things need to be actioned and tracked. This article will talk through some of the key reports to start with.

For a few years now, non-profit organizations have realized that data is integral to achieving our goals. As an industry, we must start entrenching the concepts of data collection, retention and destruction policies. That way we can truly leverage our data for the social good.

All non-profit leaders understand the importance of reports and metrics. In this article, we will discuss Lagging Indicators, an important part of iterative approaches. They couple with Leading Indicators and give you the information you need to succeed.

We all know that we are living in a data-driven world. If you know more about your donor base you can build more genuine connections. However, storing and managing data about donors leaves you open to the risks of data breaches and data audits from government entities. So how do we capture what we need in a responsible way?

As organizations add various tools to their technical ecosystem, the need to move data from one system to another becomes increasingly important. In this article learn the proper steps to take when exporting and importing data so that you can be set up for long term success!

All non-profit leaders understand the importance of reports and metrics. However, critically there are many types of reports and their purpose often gets lost in the messaging. Learn about Leading Indicators and how to set goals founded on what you know.

An industry standard tool for Analysis in both For-Profit and Not-for-Profit spaces is something called a Recency Frequency Monetary Analysis (RFM Analysis). This is a tool that leverages three common data points to show you how active your donors are at a glance.

We at Sentinel Consulting got a chance to speak with some of the Developers at Zeidman Development. The company behind Importacular, a Raiser’s Edge tool that aids in simplifying imports and keeping the process consistently accurate. We are excited to share some of the insights they had on their product and importing in general!

Alumni engagement is a long game. The seeds an alumni officer sows today will not fully bloom until many years from now. So let’s look at alumni engagement as blips on a radar and look at it like a journey. When it comes to engaging Alumni, it is important to start early, offer them value adds, communicate frequently, and track your progress.

Do you want to create a process for importing data at your Charity/Non-Profit, but need some help to get going? You’ve come to the right place. I think every fundraiser has had to spend hours on end entering data into a database. But there is a better way. While it will take some setup time the return on investment is huge!

Learn how to create your own custom shortcut in Microsoft Word. So that adding your contact information, formatting a document, or inserting a logo, is as easy as copy and paste. With Microsoft Word Macros you are only limited by your imagination … and Word formatting.