Quick Start Guide > DonorQuest Datasets

At its core DonorQuest is a database designed to collect, store and retrieve detailed data for your organization's donors. The retrieval part of this cycle is what turns data into information - information that can help your organization achieve a better understanding of your donors and their behaviors. Actionable information can be as basic as querying for your more important donors, and sending out a mailing acknowledging their generous giving in the past, and perhaps kindly asking them to move up to even higher giving levels. Or for your most generous donors, it can mean establishing and tracking a meaningful dialog with them, and storing detailed notes about each interaction using the DonorQuest contact manager - a very powerful tool in DonorQuest used to cultivate very personalized relationships with donors, scheduling future dialogs which DonorQuest will remind you of as they come due. Each DonorQuest user may schedule a contact event just between themselves and specific donors, or between other users and donors. This allows for whole teams of moves management workers within your organization to have their own list of donor interactions scheduled, based on their DonorQuest user login name.

Note that the terms Donor and Constituent are often used interchangeably in this user's guide, but technically a donor is a constituent who has actually donated something in the past. Constituent is a more general term referring to both prospects and donors. Both prospects and donors are stored in the same master table in DonorQuest, so that when a prospect becomes a donor, they do not have to be moved anywhere. This also means one simple search will find both donors and prospects and present matching records in a consolidated spreadsheet-style view. When you get the first donation for a prospect, they simply become a donor once you enter their first gift. While the master biographical (name/address) table stores both donors and prospects, they can easily be separated as needed by running a very simple query.

The DonorQuest database is divided into three datasets, Donor, Archive and Buffer. These datasets are segmented datasets, meaning that the data contained in any one dataset does NOT flow across to any other of the datasets. You will see these terms on many DonorQuest displays and options. Typically, you will only be working in the Donor dataset.

The Donor dataset is where all the information about your active donor accounts is stored. This includes data about all donor names, addresses, donations, pledges, memos, contacts, etc. The other two datasets should NOT be used to store information about your active donors.

The Archive dataset is used to store donor records that you wish to retain, but do not want in your active Donor dataset. Generally, you should not move any donor records out of the Donor dataset that have any donation or pledge history, because doing so will cause that data to drop out of reports which reference historical data. For example if a donor is removed from the Donor dataset, their individual donation information will not show up on a campaign summary report which covers all campaigns for all time. Note that there is a status field named, "Inactive" in DonorQuest which allows you to mark a constituent (donor or prospect) as being inactive while still keeping them in the Donor dataset, allowing their historical donation data to still appear on reports, while keeping them out of routine queries for mailings and such. If a constituent is moved to Archive, they are essential gone from active consideration for anything, but can still be retrieved in the future if need be.

The Buffer dataset may be used for temporary copies of donor accounts or as an intermediate step in the donor data import process. While working in the Buffer dataset, you are free to make changes to the records without affecting the master copy of a donor record housed in the Donor dataset. The Buffer dataset can be routinely purged, so never place any information in it which you wish to keep.