How Organizations Struggle with Data Fluency - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 42

DATA C AR E
Sometimes data quality is a proxy for organizational discipline and morale.
Do people throughout an organization really care or are they just collecting
a paycheck? Team members who actually care about an organization and the
organization's mission will go the extra mile to make sure data is correctly
populated, erroneous data is fixed, and extra data needed for future reference
is added. We have found issues of data care at large publicly traded companies,
academic institutions, and nonprofits.
Working with the fundraising team of a large, yet struggling nonprofit orga-
nization, we found data care and organizational morale low. The fundraising
team used Raiser's Edge , a popular fundraising software platform to capture
the all-important donor information.
Gift officers were given reports with the names of individuals in their region
that contributed more than $5,000 in any of the last 3 calendar years. Armed
with a regional list they were asked to make donor calls, visit donors person-
ally, and raise a certain dollar amount (often five to seven times their salary).
None of the gift officers reached their goals. Why? Poor data care.
When trained on Raiser's Edge , gift officers were asked to keep track of e-mails
and visits with prospective and current donors. Although this information
would be reported at a biweekly teleconference with the whole fundraising
team, little effort was made to populate the information in the company's
data product. As a result, each gift officer kept track of his donor knowledge
independently, and institutional knowledge was not built. When gift officers
left the organization, replacements started with little knowledge about donors
in their region. Although you knew past gift history, you didn't know why
they gave, what they liked, what was conveyed with the giving of the gift, or
if they had a preferred contact number. Knowledge that would be needed
for future reference was never recorded and, therefore, wasn't generated for
the organization.