You’re making history. Preserve it.

Where do you save the reports you send to donors?

Most likely, the answer is on your hard drive or in the cloud. But how many people know about them or can actually access them there?

More importantly, why does it matter?

I was recently on a Zoom call with a client organization in which the director of their signature youth education program was explaining how they’d dramatically changed the program as a result of Covid-19.

In the course of her presentation, she asked the donor relations director what his team might do with all of the info she’d been sharing.

After learning they (in collaboration with me) would write a report for current donors, she replied:

“That’s great because I’d really like to document what’s happening. This is a historical moment, and those that come after us need to know how we handled this crisis.”

Suddenly, I wondered:

How many stewardship reports have I written over the years that are floating around in the cloud when they could be part of an organization’s historical record?

Next time you finish a donor report, ask yourself if it needs to be saved beyond your hard drive. The answer is likely to be yes.