Common questions
Last updated: October 8, 2026
Dataro decides who to contact, and your CRM does the sending.
That split accounts for most of the questions that come up when a team starts using Dataro: where a campaign is actually executed, how deceased and inactive donors stay out of your audiences, and what to use while full portfolio management is being built. Each of the three has a working answer today.
Where execution happens
Dataro is where you decide who to reach and why, and your CRM or email platform is where you reach them. The rest of the product follows from that division. Audiences are ranked so you can cut them at the size you need, insights tell you which donors moved and what to do next, and playbooks package a whole selection for a campaign type. In each case the output is a list, ready for the system that sends.
For most fundraisers the execution pathway is email or mail, and both of those already exist elsewhere: a list goes to a mail house, or donors are added to a journey that is already built in the email platform the team uses. Building sending infrastructure into Dataro would mean duplicating tools your organization has already bought, trained staff on, and configured for its deliverability and compliance settings. Prioritization is the problem Dataro sets out to solve instead.
A finished audience has five routes out. Publish to your CRM pushes it across your integration, for working the list in the system of record or triggering an existing journey, and publishes appear in the CRM Queue tab. Download exports it with the columns your mail house or mail merge supplier needs, in the order they want them. An email platform that reads from your CRM is covered by publishing, and one that does not takes a download and an import. Push to Meta or Google sends it to your ad accounts for paid targeting and lookalike building. Share by email sends it to a colleague for review before anything goes out.
What Dataro replaces is not your execution tools. It is the work usually done in a spreadsheet: deciding who is worth contacting, in what order, and with what next step.
Deceased and inactive donors
Dataro excludes deceased and inactive donors from scoring on the basis of your CRM's status fields. Excluded donors are not scored, so they do not appear in ranked audiences, playbook selections, or insights. Deceased donors are also excluded from the Current Major Donors and New Donors lists on the Research Donors tab. Status fields do more than drive your CRM reports, because they also shape every audience Dataro builds for you. We recommend keeping them up to date, since doing so improves predictions, insights, and every audience you build afterward.
Scoring Exclusions is the second mechanism, for people your CRM has not flagged. Open Settings from the sidebar, go to Scoring Exclusions, and upload a file of the external contact IDs you want excluded from scoring. The file is the source of truth, and it replaces the previous list rather than adding to it. There is no undo for a single person, so to re-add someone, delete the uploaded file and re-upload it without their ID. We recommend keeping an editable copy of the file yourself, so that takes a couple of minutes rather than a rebuild.
A first-time donor can take up to 30 days to be scored, which is the most common reason a donor has no rank. That is expected behavior rather than a gap in your data, because the models need enough of a giving record to make a defensible prediction and a single first gift is not enough. If a donor gave last week and has no rank, wait for the next scoring run. If a donor gave last year and still has no rank, check their status fields and the exclusions file.
When a donor is marked as deceased in your CRM, Dataro shows a notice at the top of the Overview tab on their donor profile, whether or not the donor has been researched, and the Donors table shows a Deceased tag. On a profile researched with ProspectAI, a separate notice can appear when public records suggest the donor has died, with a Review sources action so you can check each source before you act. Public records do not cover everyone, so your CRM remains the authoritative record. For more, see Deceased donors.
Portfolio management today
If you manage prospects in portfolios, Dataro currently gives you the component parts rather than a full portfolio feature. Favorites and bulk lists together produce a working list of prospects to pursue and research. Star a donor from their profile, from a table, or from a bulk list, and they collect in your Favorites. Favorites are shared across your team, so they work as a team list rather than a personal one: if two gift officers both star donors, both sets of stars appear in the same Favorites view.
A full portfolio construct is not available yet. There is no pipeline stage on a prospect, no owner assignment inside Dataro, and no review-before-add step where a manager approves prospects into an officer's portfolio. Those are on the post-launch roadmap.
Three points explain how portfolios and Dataro fit together. Dataro sends predictions and recommendations across your whole file, so it does not need to know whose portfolio someone is in to score them. Portfolio filtering happens CRM-side, where your CRM decides which subset of donors each gift officer sees, based on its owner or portfolio field. And every CRM handles portfolios differently, which is why Dataro does not reimplement the concept. Because scores are produced across the whole file, a donor is never left out of a prediction for being unassigned.
The pattern that works right now is one saved audience per gift officer:
Confirm which field in your CRM holds the portfolio owner, and make sure it is included in your Dataro integration as a custom field.
In the Audience Builder, filter on that field for a single owner, plus whatever propensity criteria matter for the program.
Save the audience with the owner's name in the title.
Repeat per owner, and route recommendations through those audiences.
Ten officers means ten audiences. Every part of this pattern is available today, and it gives each officer a list scoped to the donors they are responsible for.
Frequently asked questions
Can I send an email directly from Dataro?
No. Dataro is the recommendation and prioritization layer, so sending happens in your email platform or CRM. Build and rank the audience in Dataro, then push or download it to the tool that sends.
Should I apply exclusions in Dataro or in my CRM?
Both work. Apply them in Dataro when the list you push needs to be final, particularly for an external mail supplier, bearing in mind that Dataro knows only what your CRM has synced: API-connected CRMs receive an incremental update every 24 hours, so a suppression added this morning may not be reflected yet. Rely on CRM suppression when your CRM is the authoritative source for consent and do-not-contact rules, and expect the audience count in Dataro to be larger than the number actually contacted, which your reporting then has to reconcile. We recommend not splitting the logic across both, because your counts then become difficult to explain.
If I execute outside Dataro, how does Dataro know what happened?
Through your CRM. Gifts and interactions recorded there come back on the sync: an incremental update every 24 hours for API-connected CRMs, a full extract every 30 days, and a prediction refresh every 7 days. Anything you record in your CRM feeds the next round of predictions.
A donor who died last year is still appearing in my audiences.
Check their CRM status field first, because that is what drives the exclusion. If your CRM has no way to record it, or the record is not there yet, add their external contact ID to the Scoring Exclusions file under Settings.
Does excluding someone remove them from Dataro?
No. Exclusion applies to scoring, so they are not ranked and do not turn up in ranked audiences or insights. The donor's record and giving history are unaffected.
Why does my brand new donor have no rank?
Because a first-time donor can take up to 30 days to be scored. If a donor has been giving for longer than that and still has no rank, either their rank exceeds 200,000, their probability is below 1 in 10,000, or they are excluded from scoring.
Can Dataro tell me who on my file has died?
Sometimes. On a profile researched with ProspectAI, a notice appears when public records such as an obituary suggest the donor has died, and Review sources shows what was found. Public records do not cover everyone, so your CRM remains the authoritative source, which is why keeping status fields up to date matters.
When will full portfolio management arrive?
Post-launch, and there is no date yet. If portfolio management is central to how your team works, tell your CSM, since customer demand is what prioritizes it.