Nonprofit Data Management: What do you do with too much data? | The Data Coach

Transcript:

Hi, my name is Lindsay. I am The Data Coach, and today we're going to start our series on data management for nonprofit organizations. Specifically, we're going to talk about the most common challenges that nonprofits face in collecting and organizing their data, and we're going to talk about steps that you can take to begin addressing some of these challenges no matter the size of your nonprofit, the budget, or your own technical know how.

But before we get into it, first, what is data management?

Data management is the process of collecting, storing, organizing, protecting, and using data to make informed decisions. For non profit organizations, data management can help you make decisions about program development, funding strategies, outreach [00:01:00] strategies staffing, board management, and so much more. But we can't use our data effectively if we don't know where the data lives, if the data is messy, it's out of date, it's incomplete, if we can't get the data out of the system, which I hear about a lot, or if the data is stored in lots of different places and none of those systems can really talk to each other.

So the way that we "do" data management is by developing and implementing policies that will help us keep our data clean, organized, and easily accessible. And there are different kinds of policies that we can put in place to begin to do all of that. So many that it can feel overwhelming. That's why in this series, we're going to tackle data management one challenge at a time. And today's challenge is, what do you do with too much data?

If you're in a nonprofit, you know that data is coming in fast [00:02:00] and hot from all different kinds of sources. Newsletter signups, event registrations, attendance, online donation forms, program signups, your website, your communications analytics , case tracking, hotline calls, and probably a lot more that I'm not thinking of. If you're a nonprofit leader, you may feel like you should be using everything that you have. The more data, the better, right? At the same time, the idea of trying to create policies and processes for each data source or database or data type, especially if this is not your primary job, may make you feel like hiding under the desk until the anxiety passes, which is fine.

You are more than welcome to do that. No judgment.

But once you're back, I do have good news for you. You do not have to use all of the data that you have right this second. Okay, no one is going to call the data police. You will not go to data jail and you will not be [00:03:00] heckled by data nerds hiding out in the parking lot. To do data management effectively, especially if you're a smaller organization that's tight on resources, the first step is figure out what data is going to help you answer the most critical questions that you have about your nonprofit's progress. And here's how you can do it.

What do you want to know?

Before we even get near a computer, I encourage you to sit down and reflect on this question: what do I want to know about my nonprofit organization? If that feels too big, a little too lofty, you can break that question down into sections. What do I want to know about my programs? What do I want to know about my funders? What do I want to know about our hiring and retention practices? What do I want to know about our DEI initiatives?

Yeah, that's right. I said DEI. This is a pro-DEI channel.

If you have a pretty recent strategic plan, you can use that as a reference to get some ideas about what your big questions might be. I also really encourage you to talk to your staff, volunteers, board members to get their thoughts on the kind of questions they would like to ask about the organization. Once you have all your questions, I encourage you to then think about why these questions are important. In other words, how can the answers to these questions help you make informed decisions for your organization? For instance, say you have a question about program participation. Has it increased? Has it decreased? Where are our participants coming from? Why are those questions important? Maybe you can use that information to get new sources of funding because you've been able to demonstrate success. Or maybe it'll help you rethink some outreach strategies to garner more participation in the future.

Once you have your questions, and you know why [00:05:00] they're important start to think of a list of data that you would need to answer those questions. So if you have questions about program participants, maybe you're going to need attendance data or sign up data for the past 2, 3 years, whatever it is. Don't worry at this point about whether or not the data exists. For now, get everything down that you can think of that's going to help you answer those questions that you've identified. Now, once you complete this process, you're going to have much more clarity on the data that is most important to focus on to make the best decisions for your organization.

Where does the data live?

Once you have your questions, your purpose, your relevant data, it's time to go on a little bit of a hunt and figure out where this data might be living within the organization. So going back to the program participant question. Where can you find this information? Maybe you have an online form that people use to sign up for programs. Maybe you're keeping track of attendance in an Excel spreadsheet. Maybe you're doing both. Maybe you're doing neither. Maybe there's more. No matter what, put all of the data sources that you can think of in a spreadsheet for now. And later on you can decide what you want to use as a primary source. Use this opportunity to document any concerns you might have about that data. Maybe it's outdated, maybe it's not easily accessible. This is a great opportunity to really connect with your staff, your volunteers on this get their perspectives on what they think might be wrong with the data and start to generate some ideas about how it can be fixed.

And while I'm saying put this all in a spreadsheet I'm saying that because I'm a spreadsheet person. It's how my brain works. But you can put together a visual map. You can do this on a whiteboard. Do this in whatever way that works for you, for your learning style, your team's learning style, just so long as it's something that could be easily referenced and [00:07:00] understood by anyone who's going to be responsible for the data in the future.

Creating a reporting schedule

Now you have your important data. You know where it lives. Next, you could do one of two things. If your data is messy, there are errors or issues, now is the time to go fix them. We have a video about dealing with a messy database that I will link in the description that can help you out as you're going through this process of fixing any errors or mistakes in your data. If the data is clean, or once you finish up that cleaning step, I would encourage you to create a reporting schedule. What a reporting schedule is going to do Is tell you what kinds of data that you want pulled, how frequently you want that data pulled, who's going to be responsible for pulling that data and who are the people that should be reviewing the findings? Be sure to include how the findings from these reports are going to help inform your decision [00:08:00] making for the organization.

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Take your time

So congratulations. You have done the data management! You have figured out the most important data you're collecting. You've identified where the data is stored. You articulated a process for using the data, and you've even started to dabble a little bit into data privacy by being clear on who has access to the data and how it's going to be shared across groups. If this still feels a little bit overwhelming again, especially if you're smaller, not a lot of time and resources, please don't panic. I feel like I say this in every video, please don't panic. And the reason I say please don't panic is because you can do this however you want. You can decide maybe in the first quarter, first two quarters of the year, you're just going to deal with the data that's relevant to your programs.

That's it. And then maybe in the second half of the year, you'll start to think [00:09:00] about data that's relevant to staffing or HR issues. You can do this however you want and at the pace that works best for you. I think what matters ultimately for funders, for community members is that you are showing initiative. You are showing that you understand the importance of data and that you are interested in using your data the right way to make good decisions. And you're showing people that your data has a purpose and that all the information that you're collecting is really going toward tracking your progress to achieve your mission.

At The Data Coach, we work with nonprofit organizations to help you clean up your data, set up your data policies and procedures deal with issues of data privacy and security, and a whole bunch more. If you are interested in working with us, I will put my email address and then also a Calendly link so you can schedule [00:10:00] a meeting with me, all of that will be in the description box below. And as always, this still feels wild to say, please subscribe to stay up to date on our latest videos. We're a pretty new channel, so please share this with all of your non profit friends who might be interested. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below. They could become the topic of our next video, and thank you so much for watching.

We'll see you soon. Bye.