Ah, the end of the fiscal year. While the rest of the world slips into vacation mode, you're in the trenches: pulling LYBUNT and SYBUNT lists, chasing down giving histories, making sure gifts are entered before the clock runs out, and re-pulling progress-to-goal reports every time someone in leadership asks "but where are we really?" 

As a self-confessed database nerd, I would always keep a running list of Summer Projects throughout the year. Some were hard-won lessons I wished I'd learned the year before; some were just the slow, unglamorous database cleaning tasks that make everything run better once they're done; and some were (often highly optimistic) projects I’d love to accomplish. Here are a few annual tasks I think every DBM should try to knock out at least once.

While these suggestions apply to all donor databases, the instructions I’ve included are specifically geared toward Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT^Ⓡ users.

Let's get into it.

Delete static queries that haven't been modified or run in more than 12 months. This is one of those tasks that sounds optional until you understand what static queries are actually doing to your system in the background.

A static query captures the records that met your criteria at the time the query was created and holds onto them as static keys, one pointer per record. Those keys don't evaporate when you stop using the query. They sit in the database consuming space, and in a cloud-hosted NXT environment, that accumulation has real consequences. NXT Web View, your dashboards, and any third-party integrations all rely on SKY API calls to pull data from the cloud backend, and if millions of orphaned static query keys bog down the backend, SQL search indexing slows down, which means your lists load slower, your Web View pages take longer to populate, and your integrations drag.

Blackbaud's own documentation is clear that deleting old queries is the intended mechanism for freeing up space in the database, and the mass deletion utility makes it reasonably painless.

How to do it:

Check out this Knowledgebase article for a full walkthrough.

Review your code tables (Title, Suffix, Appeal, Campaign, and any others your organization uses) in Config > Tables. The Table Cleanup utility has fully transitioned to the unified view and is significantly more user-friendly than before. Use it to merge duplicates and delete obsolete entries.

If any of your tables have grown to more than 1,000 entries, prioritize those. Tables at that size begin to degrade search performance, so the bigger the table, the more urgently it needs attention.

I have yet to meet a database manager with the perfect table setup. Most of us inherit a hot mess less-than-ideal table situation. Select 3-5 high-impact tables to focus on this year.

Depending on your organization's Campaign/Fund/Appeal (C/F/A) structure, you'll likely be marking at least two out of three of those record types as inactive at fiscal year-end. For most organizations, either your Campaign or your Fund records are your evergreen records that don’t change year to year, and Appeals almost always change year to year. Mark FY26 (and any older active records) as inactive so they stop cluttering dropdown menus and active data entry fields.

While you're in there, go ahead and build out your C/F/A records for the upcoming fiscal year. Your future self in the middle of a busy fall campaign season will genuinely thank you.

One other thing: if your naming convention doesn't already include the fiscal year, start now. FY27 Annual Campaign, FY27 Winter Appeal, FY27 Gala. It's a small habit that makes filtering, reporting, and eventually deactivating records much easier.

Run gift queries to flag open opportunities that should be closed or moved. Some examples include:

This is also a good opportunity for major gift officers to confirm they have received credit for all the gifts they secured.

Similar to Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals: mark event records from the previous fiscal year as inactive. It cleans up the view and makes your current events much easier to find.

Apply the same FYxx naming convention logic here and create event records for upcoming events now while things are slower. This matters more than it might seem because there is currently no option to copy event forms from one event record to another, which means building a form from scratch takes real time. Draft those event forms now so you're not scrambling in the fall.

Pull static queries of the constituent codes you'll need to report on before you roll over your database for the new school year. Gift records in RE NXT only reflect the donor's primary constituent code at the time of the gift. Now that all constituencies are counted individually rather than through a hierarchy, having static snapshots of which constituents held which codes at the time of giving is the most reliable way to accurately pull giving history by constituent code when DASL reporting time comes around.

*DASL (Data and Analysis for School Leadership) is an online benchmarking and data-collection platform managed by the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) and used by schools in the U.S.

These tasks aren't glamorous, but they're the kind of thing your future self will quietly appreciate in October when the data is clean, the dropdowns aren't cluttered with three years of inactive appeals, and you're not untangling a duplicate mess in the middle of a major gift push. Do a little now, thank yourself later.

If your summer project list is longer than your capacity to tackle it, that's what I'm here for — reach out and let's talk. And, if there's a cleanup task you swear by that I didn't mention, drop it in the comments — I'm always adding to the list.

-MALLORY

Because somebody has to care about the data.

The ideas, expertise, and opinions here are mine. Claude helped me write them down.