Do you have a process, tool, or data problem?
If you’re part of the team that drives data operations for your organization, you’ve got a big job. And you’re likely receiving a lot of questions – and feedback – regularly.
Understanding if that dataset is really taking too long to load or that piece of reporting is actually incorrect is only half of the battle. You’ve then got to determine why that’s happening.
We understand. We’ve been in those seats, too. These are a few guided questions to help you uncover what the source of your challenges may be.
Five Questions to Ask
1. Have you conducted a persona-level exercise to understand what content and marketing pieces an audience member on your file has received?
Breaking this information down on a granular level and seeing how your strategy is playing out from the eyes of a constituent can be eye-opening. You may see that they’re receiving information they were never supposed to. Perhaps they’re receiving too many content pieces. Or perhaps they’re not engaging at all. Conduct this exercise for three or four constituents on your file who represent different audience subsets – whether that’s based on where they are in their lifecycle or how much they’ve previously given – and see what stands out to you. This will help you isolate for opportunities to fix what’s not going well.
2. How frequently is your team doing manual data reporting or basic tasks, such as exports? And why?
Sit down with members of your team to get a true feel for what a day in their life is like. If they’re running manual processes that are taking up valuable time, it’s to everyone’s advantage for you to understand why that is. Is your tool actually incapable of a more manual process, or do you perhaps need more team training to utilize your solutions infrastructure to its highest advantage? Are there a few automation tasks that you can assign out to an external partner that would greatly help your internal team? Do you perhaps need to make the case for another employee to support the team’s workload. Get a sense of what’s truly happening day-to-day so you can discover why it’s happening.
3. From how many sources are you ingesting new constituent information?
The challenge of making sure all of your data ends up in one place is a common one. From your events team to your volunteer team to your fundraising team, most nonprofits have many employees who might be taking in constituent information each day. You want to get a true understanding of where those responsibilities lie and with whom. From there, you might uncover sources of misalignment that could result in data inconsistency. Knowing the current state of how information is being collected allows you to work upstream in setting an operational process in place to correct it.
4. Are all new audience members flowing into your CRM of record?
This question is a big one. We recommend creating a map so that you can work backwards in understanding how your data is flowing. What you’re looking for: Do all systems sync back to the same ultimate source of truth? If not, is there a logical reason why, or a manual process for getting the information into your system of record? What does that manual process look like? How often does your data sync occur? Is it fast enough for you to have updated information every time you’re deploying a marketing effort? The answers to these questions will point you in the right direction for asking deeper questions.
5. What does your source code structure look like, and how are teams operationalizing it?
When it comes to source code rules, even the best-laid plans don’t work if all teams aren’t following the same process. Revisit what your source code rules look like across a few key teams, and then conduct a few interviews with key employees who need to implement them. Did they even know you had source code guidance they should follow? If not, this is a good opportunity to build some employee training into their onboarding cycle and to conduct a refresher session.
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With any luck, these questions will help you start to dig into how your team is putting its resources to use so that you can understand where opportunities for improvement lie, whether that’s in process, in your solutions infrastructure, or in your data rules.
When you’re ready, we’re here to support that investigation process and discuss how you can take action based on what you’re learning. Get in touch.