How to prioritize good data housekeeping
Clean data is at the heart of a well-functioning nonprofit but how can you lead your org to good data housekeeping? Here’s our advice.
The first message hits at 9:07am. It’s a heads-up from your fundraising lead that today’s campaign will be late. There’s a problem with the list, he says. The next is an hour later, and it’s a note in the dev channel, saying an IT-development tiger team is working on it. At noon, you ping your fundraising lead again and he looks up at the camera, frazzled, with eyes that tell you they have been in spreadsheets all morning. You learn that he has had to export the troublesome list out of the database entirely for some manual TLC. The campaign will not be sent today, and your org will have missed the window to raise funds around a once-a-year news event. It’s a total bummer.
This is a scenario familiar to too many nonprofit tech leaders, who rank data quality as their second biggest challenge to data use. Clean, reliable, accessible data is critical to every part of your organization. Without it:
- Your fundraising team cannot segment and tailor appeals nor demonstrate to donors that your organization knows them well.
- Your planned giving experts can’t surface high-dollar donors for thoughtful engagement.
- The reports your leadership needs to make good decisions are incomplete, incorrect, or woefully out of date.
- Teams are spending hours and days they don’t have manually “fixing” the data in disparate systems—like your fundraising lead, who is stuck in Excel purgatory.
- Programs leaders are flying blind, unable to incorporate new information into their plans, which often leads to waste.
- Staff across your org lose data trust, returning to gut decisions and “whatever we did last time.”
But when you have data issues, it may feel like a big, intractable problem. Maybe you even have a Post-it for that. Maybe it’s been on your desk for the better part of a year and the edges are starting to peel off. Maybe we’re projecting a little bit here. 😊 But you gotta eat that elephant. Here’s how:
1 Create a Data Council
Form a team with representatives from key departments (fundraising, marketing, programs, finance, IT) to prioritize data cleanliness. Meet monthly to review data capture, usage, issues, and necessary changes. This is also an opportunity to come together and support each other, build camaraderie, and create an understanding of why capturing certain data is important. I’ve never seen so much joy when a fundraiser doesn’t have to bug a member of the program team for information to use in a grant or impact report.
2 Empower your data admin
Candy is a good start but you’re going to need structural changes to really help them implement better data hygiene and best practices across the org. This includes setting up data access, assessing data structure, updating documentation, cleaning up data codes, making global changes, and running quality control checks. The good news is that your data admin is likely to be unnervingly excited about this plan.
3 Build a roadmap
Task your Data Council with prioritizing the areas of most need and turn that into a data roadmap. Some areas of focus might be centralizing data, staff training, updated or upgraded systems, creating templates, and improving workflows. Team Heller can help with assessments, strategic advice, and enhancements using best-in-class tools.
4 Make it fun
Celebrate your iterative progress. Normalize talking about data issues and fixes in meetings and team channels. Found two versions of a donor? Merge them while making a loud squishing noise. Run an ongoing scavenger hunt for duplicates with some swag or candy as a prize. Spend half a day each quarter deduping accompanied by a dedicated playlist that includes the highly infectious Doop by Doop. (Did we really make this playlist? Yes, we did.)
To make data quality everyone’s responsibility, your team will need a little help from you. Determine and normalize the steps everyone in your org should take to keep the database clean, empower them with guidelines and support, and you can make good data housekeeping a natural part of your workflows.
What’s next?
If you’re ready to clean, organize, and optimize your data, we can help. By assessing your CRM use and surfacing tools and approaches that we know work for nonprofits, we can save time and improve your data trust and accuracy. Contact us today to learn more.
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