Start With an Honest Donor C.A.R.E.™ Audit
How do I know if my donor care is scattered?
Scattered donor care rarely looks like neglect.
It looks like a good development director with three spreadsheets. A board member who promised an introduction but has no place to record it. A first-time giver thanked by email while the handwritten note waits under a folder. A colleague who knows a supporter is moving, but assumes everyone else knows too.
The care is present. The shared picture is not.
That is why an audit should begin with curiosity rather than accusation. Its job is not to identify who dropped the ball. Its job is to show how many good people are being asked to keep the same ball in the air without seeing one another’s hands.
What Scattered Actually Means
Information can be accurate and still be scattered.
Your database may hold every gift. An inbox may hold the latest reply. A spreadsheet may hold the event list. One person may remember the family history, another the board connection, and a third the promise to call in November.
Each piece can be right while the relationship remains impossible to see.
Could someone else understand the next step without asking the person who always remembers?
That is the question beneath the audit.
Where to Look First
Begin by naming every place relational knowledge lives. Include the official systems and the unofficial ones: inboxes, text threads, notebooks, meeting minutes, calendars, spreadsheets, board packets, and personal memory.
Do not fix anything yet.
For each place, ask what it holds, who can see it, and whether it leads to a named next move. You are looking for handoffs that depend on one person translating the entire story.
The person doing that translation has probably protected the organization more times than anyone knows. The audit should make that labor visible, not turn it into evidence against them.
How to Test Shared Memory
Choose twenty relationships that matter to the organization. For each one, ask whether a colleague could find four things without asking the usual keeper of the story:
Who owns the relationship now? What happened most recently? What has the organization promised? What is the next appropriate move, including an intentional decision to wait?
Do not answer from the room’s memory. Answer from what another person could actually find.
Shared care begins when the next person can find the promise.
What the Audit Does Not Prove
A scattered system does not prove that relationships are weak. It does not prove the team lacks discipline. It does not tell you who should receive an invitation or what Strategy belongs to them.
Those decisions require something more thoughtful.
Before a first gift, The Approach uses complete C.A.R.E.™ reviews to create a meaningful sort. At least twenty complete relationships are needed before a provisional Strategy view is useful. Thirty is an encouraged first-session goal. Forty, or the complete intended list when it is smaller, creates a trusted working sort.
The audit comes first because incomplete knowledge should stay visible. Kindred never turns unknown into zero or quietly drops an unreviewed person into Strategy 3.
Try This Tuesday
Run the shared-memory test with five names, not twenty.
Give a colleague ten minutes and ask them to find the owner, last meaningful interaction, open promise, and next move for each person. Record what they can find without explanation from you.
Then thank them and stop. Do not turn the exercise into a repair meeting.
What is missing will give you a clean place to begin together.
The full audit is not on the website yet. Reply and I will send it to you. Not because your team needs another judgment, but because the care already happening deserves a shared place to become visible.
Keep up the good work of caring for people. It really does matter!
Kevin Eastway Founder and Principal, Kindred rOS
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