Donor Management Spreadsheet: Stewardship for Small Nonprofits

GivingTuesday gifts land today, and the person who has to thank each donor is often the same person still running the appeal.

For a development officer working alone, two stewardship rules carry most of the weight. First, thank fast and track it: set a thank-you deadline you can actually keep and record the date each gift was acknowledged. Second, give each donor a contact rhythm, monthly for some, quarterly or annual for others, and judge "overdue" against that rhythm instead of one number of days for everyone. A monthly donor silent for 80 days is a warning sign. A quarterly donor at 80 days isn't yet.

Our Donor Management System for Excel and Google Sheets works this way. It flags any gift left unthanked for more than 14 days, scores donor health from 0 to 100 on recency, frequency, depth, reciprocity and promises kept, and shows "Slipping" when contacts in the last 90 days fall behind the 90 before. The donor register is ranked by what needs doing, with a written next action on each row.

By January you know which new donors heard back from you, and which didn't.

It doesn't calculate a retention rate or LYBUNT reports, and it issues no tax receipts.