The Heart of the Problem: Data Disarray
“There are multiple spreadsheets all over. We have to check a half a dozen places to get information that we need. Updating data is a nightmare for the same reason.”
In both the nonprofit and commercial sectors, data management is key to implementing and maintaining successful operations. Running an organization on multiple isolated applications spells redundant daily processes and database maintenance.
Figuratively speaking, practicing poor data management is akin to building a house with no foundation, or worse, building a city without intersecting streets.
One of the areas hardest hit by this data disarray is contact management, or the tracking of people and relationships. At any given time, organizers need to keep track of information about supporters, potential volunteers, phonebankers, people who play a bridge role and can activate their networks rapidly, and current or potential donors.
Any organizer will tell you that understanding an organizational base is a fundamental component of running (and winning) campaigns. In order to serve constituents and communities, you need to know them.
Yet, in the absence of infrastructure to manage information about constituents and communities, organizers often cannot engage and serve them in the most productive ways. Responses to our questions about data management revealed the extent of technology chaos within many organizations:
- More than 50% of organizations use slips of paper, Excel spreadsheets, and personal contact managers (such as Outlook) to manage organizational data.
- 51% were managing more than four repositories of data about the organization’s various constituents.
- Only 7% of respondents said that their systems share data easily (see Table 5).
Interestingly, larger annual budgets have little relationship to the ease of data integration. Organizations with budgets over $4 million were nearly as likely as those with budgets under $100,000 to report maintaining separate systems without easy data integration.
Many organizers indicated they could use data better if they had more segmentation or tracking power. They reported wanting better ways to track, tag, and identify members. When asked how long it would take them to assemble a clean list of their constituents, only 34% could do this in under an hour. 47% of respondents reported it could take anywhere from three to 25 hours to complete this simple task.
On a scale of 1-10, respondents were asked to rate the importance of data integration between their fundraising and online organizing tools. Nearly 70% chose ratings between 7-10, signifying that a vast majority consider integration both a key obstacle and solution.
This report compiles insights from more than 400 social change groups, technology providers, and nonprofit technology capacity builders, examining the needs of organizers working to utilize new technologies, and offering recommendations for how to meet those needs more effectively.
November 10th, 2006 at 9:11 am PST
I don’t know how the survey was conducted, but lumping Outlook with “slips of paper” above does not distinguish between Outlook as a personal contact manager, and Outlook as groupware with an Exchange Server backend.
While not the best tool for list management, Outlook in front of Exchange does offer tight integration with other MS Office applications, public folders for shared rolodexes, and add-ons that extend its functionality. In this context it may be a reasonable way to manage organizational data, in contrast to those pesky slips of paper.