Three of four · The morning list
Most CRMs wait to be asked a question
A database full of the right information is still useless at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday if you have to know what to look for. The work that grows an audience is not hard to do. It is hard to remember to do, forever, while also running a concert season.
How it works
Five questions, asked of everything, every night
A sweep runs across your whole organization overnight, and again after every import. It looks for five specific kinds of neglect, and says so on the days it finds none.
Reciprocity
Gifts that arrived and were never acknowledged, oldest first, with the wait counted in days so you can see which ones have become embarrassing.
Commitment
Follow-ups you promised and dated, now overdue. If you told somebody in March that you would call, Fay is the thing that remembers in April.
Onboarding
First-timers from your most recent event who have not been welcomed. A first concert is the shortest window you will ever have to turn an attendee into a habit.
Attrition
Donors whose attendance has lapsed, and regulars who keep coming but have never been asked for anything. Both are quiet, and both are expensive.
Cultivation
Welcome, cultivate, win back, renew. One suggestion per person per kind, ever. Fay suggests generously and then never nags about the same thing twice.
Silence, when it is earned
On a day when every gift is thanked, every promise kept and no room is waiting, the page says so and stops. A list that always has something on it is a list nobody believes.
The temptation with a system like this is to make it clever: scores, predictions, a model that ranks your donors by likelihood to give. Fay deliberately does not. Every item on that list is something you could have worked out yourself from your own records. Fay's contribution is that it actually did, last night, across all of them, and it will do it again tomorrow whether or not anyone remembers.
Dismiss anything and it stays dismissed. Acting on a suggestion resolves it and logs the contact against that person in the same motion, so the list is never bookkeeping about bookkeeping.
Next: you have done the work all season. In June somebody on the board is going to ask whether it made any difference.