Difference Between Access & Fundraising Software Database
The major difference between Access and a dedicated Fundraising Software Database, or Donor Management System (DMS) program, is similar to the difference between a truckload of construction material to build a house and a house that is already built.
Access, with a few minutes programming, can be set up to perform very rudimentary fundraising tracking for a limited donor base. To match the ease of use, and the specialized functions of an off-the-shelf DMS an Access database programmer would spend hundreds of hours in setup and there would still be some features lacking.
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Costs
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Donor management systems range in price from several hundred dollars for small nonprofits with several hundred donors to well over $20,000 for large institutions tracking millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of donors. All DMS have some features in common that would be difficult to duplicate with Access.
Donor Records
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Creating and modifying donor records is the heart of any DMS system. Knowing who the donors are and having access to their information is vital in fundraising. With the fluxes in household relationships and the addresses of people, flexibility is the key in entering the correct information. Just tracking the information for two spouses, along with other donors who may live in the household, can rapidly overwhelm a simple Access database.
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Gift Tracking
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Gift giving and tracking can have a dozen or more variables that need to be accounted for. Soft, hard and pledged gifts are tracked separately, and the coding for the origin of the gift and the directed fund must be entered appropriately. New codes may have to be created on the fly and old codes modified. Waiting for a recoding of Access to do this can significantly delay data entry.
Letter Generation
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The better DMS allows easy "thank you" letter generation. Pulling information from a variety of sources and using one of many pre-existing templates, donor letters generated seem custom-tailored for each donor and gift. Access can do something similar but modifying the process to account for additional, new information or letter structures may mean modifying the internal programming.
Segmenting
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Segmenting the donor base, or choosing who gets mailed which letter request depending upon their past giving history, is a system-intensive crunching of information that requires mixing and matching the recency, the frequency and the monetary amount of gifts for donors, without overlapping duplicate donors in the same household. Because choosing which donor variables are added to the segmentation may change with each new mailing, a program created in Access may not have the required flexibility.
A Final Word of Advice
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According to Tech Soup, which provides technological information for nonprofits, one word answers the question about creating a custom donor database program from a database programs like Access. Their advice is "don't." They consider it not worth the effort when there are so many good programs available right now that provide anything a nonprofit could want.
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