Just as important as keeping your contacts straight is keeping your funding solicitations well-organized.  One way to do this is through the use of the "Proposal" system.  Keeping track of the proposals or funding requests you send to people or organizations will help you to track where your time is spent, not to mention the "life cycle" of the proposal in question.

Again, consistency is key when it comes to keeping your proposals in order.  If you know you will have a lot of proposals, develop some guidelines as to how these should be entered into the system.  Should you indicate the calendar or fiscal year in the proposal's name?  What kind of giving this proposal falls under?

An example of codes you might develop for the database:

FY10: Operating = A Fiscal Year 2010 proposal for operating support.

FY10C: Astronomy Building = A Fiscal Year 2010 Capital support proposal for the astronomy building.

Your "naming" system should be as simple as possible while still allowing other employees to see, at a glance, what the donor or potential donor's solicitation history looks like.

The rest of the proposal record should be filled in as appropriate.  Make sure you have the "Sent" or "Asked" date filled out when you actually ask the donor for a gift.  Add in the amount of the ask - did you solicit Jane R. for $500, or for $5,000?  Do you expect to receive the amount you asked for, or a smaller gift?

Similar to the "relationship" post, here too I counsel anyone designing a database entry system to keep it as simple as possible.  Drop down fields should have as many options as necessary to get the job done - without being overwhelming.  Avoid redundancy as much as possible; an employee shouldn't have to edit three parts of a proposal when one will suffice.  This is especially important if you want anyone to actually follow your guidelines!

Databases like Raiser's Edge (RE) are extremely powerful, but they require "care and feeding".  It isn't enough to create a record and drop your donor's information into the document with no regard to consistency.  If you're starting up an NPO, you're lucky: you can design "best practices" now, and while you'll need to make sure your volunteers or employees stick to it, you'll be making a clean start.

If you're part of an established organization, your job is a little more difficult: not only do you need to develop best practices; you should change your pre-existing and active records to the new system, and you'll need to convince your fellow employees to follow the system.  This post will cover tips for your database records involving people and organizations; funding requests will be another post!

What do I mean by consistency and best practices?

1. Make sure that records are classified appropriately.   Your corporate donors should be marked as "Corporate"; your trustees should have their own tag (and if you have a large organization, you may want to decide who can edit a Trustee record - but that's another post).
2. For individuals and people attached to corporate or foundation records, categorize addresses, contact information, contact types, etc., systematically.  For example, all daytime numbers should be labeled "Daytime", not "Daytime-3" or "Day" or "Phone #2".  All business numbers should be labeled "Business", not "Listserv"!
3. Keep the number of available choices in a given record as low as possible while still allowing you to enter all needed information.  You don't need ten different "e-mail" options - would you contact the same donor using two or three of her e-mail addresses?  For your major or corporate donors you may need a secretary or an assistant; attach them as a RELATIONSHIP, rather than trying to squish their information into the primary person's record.  Add a note to the record stating that Mr. Smith's secretary should be contacted, if need be.
4. Do you mail a lot of things out using your database?  Entering titles (Mr./Ms. etc), salutations ("Dear Mr. Smith...") and addressees (Mr. John Smith) will save you time and frustration in the long run.  Who wants to export a 500-name mailing list for a mail merge, only to find that the title "Mr." needs to be entered manually to 200 of those names?

These efforts, among others, will pay off in the long run - and will reduce the wailing and gnashing of teeth when it's time to send out your yearly gala invitations!