Make Smarter Decisions with Quality Data

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe how organizations use data to improve decision-making.
  
• Explain the importance of choosing the right data collection process for your organization.
  
• Discuss why it’s critical to keep data accurate.
  

Become a Data-Driven Organization

Salesforce is a powerful platform for collecting and organizing nonprofit data, and Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) has a data model built specifically for organizations like yours.

But there’s only so much you can do with individual records. Sure, you can follow each donor relationship and donation, but that doesn’t show you trends. You need more to make data-driven decisions.

Fortunately, Salesforce comes with a powerful suite of tools to create reports and dashboards. NPSP gets you started with template reports and dashboards to find donor and stakeholder trends and become a data-driven organization.

With a little customization, you can create new reports like a breakdown of individual donor giving by state. The screenshot shows ‌a sample report.

The report aggregates donations by US state with summary values. It’s based on a packaged NPSP report with added filters and groupings to show data that answers an organization’s specific questions.

In this module, you learn how to use and customize the default NPSP reports. But first, you explore data accuracy.

Why start here? The key to accurate reports is trustworthy data. Even the most advanced reporting tools won’t help you if your data isn’t accurate. This is especially important for nonprofits working to show that their programs and services are having a real impact. 

Create a Data-Collection Strategy

To get good data for accurate reporting, you need to start with a strategy.

Consider the example of No More Homelessness (NMH), a nonprofit working to help people who are unhoused. NMH wants to become a data-driven organization—so the nonprofit is using Salesforce. The reporting feature is one of the main reasons NMH and many other nonprofits choose NPSP and Salesforce.

Using Salesforce reports and dashboards, the NMH team can compare, evaluate, and categorize data to make informed decisions about their fundraising and program efforts. But before the team can use these incredible tools, they must collect the right data. 

With the versatility of Salesforce, NMH can customize NPSP to capture any data it wants. But just because you can collect all the data in the world doesn’t mean you should. Before the staff at NMH customize their NPSP org, they sit down to brainstorm what data they want to capture and why.

They start with the following basics.

• What data do staff need for their jobs?
  
• What data do funders require?
  
• What reports can help staff make strategic decisions?
  

After answering these questions, the NMH staff realizes they want to collect lots of information about program clients, volunteers, donors, donations, campaigns, their buildings, their daily activities, and more.

But NMH can’t afford to spend time with data unless it helps the staff make decisions and improve their work. So it’s important to create a plan for how data gets into Salesforce, who’s responsible for keeping data updated, and how each data point serves the organization.

Data collection brings with it a huge social responsibility. For example, it’s common in social services to ask clients for demographic information. But questions about gender, race, and sexual orientation can alienate people or be used to discriminate.

Determine the business rationale for every data point, how each fits into your strategy, and how you’ll use the data.

Luckily, there are great toolkits available that can help you think through what you collect and the implications. See the Resources section for a link to toolkits from Racial Equity Tools.

Keep Data Accurate

These days, NMH collects and adds quality data to its Salesforce org, and the nonprofit’s reports reflect that. It wasn’t always this way, though. While NMH first got started with Salesforce, staff sometimes forgot to enter key information, or they accidentally mistyped and entered the wrong information.

In the CRM world, there’s a saying: garbage in, garbage out. In other words, if you have bad data, your reports will also be incorrect.

Data can be flawed in many ways, such as due to:

• Incomplete records, such as a record with empty data fields
  
• Missing records, such as an unaccounted-for critical donor or gift
  
• Duplicate records, such as two contact records for the same donor
  
• Out-of-date data, such as old addresses
  
• Inconsistent data, such as entering CA and California in the same field to represent the same value
  

Research shows that bad data is consistently linked with lost revenue, wasted time, and other inefficiencies. And for nonprofits with limited resources and no time to lose, having bad data can ‌hinder your organization from achieving its mission.

How does NMH keep its data so pristine? 

Explore the Three Steps for Quality Data

There are three things you can do to make sure quality data is entered into your Salesforce org.

First, be mindful of the data you want to collect. Data without purpose is just more to manage. Too much irrelevant data can get in the way of your important work.  

Second, configure tools in Salesforce to enforce data quality, such as required fields, in-app guidance, help text, and validation rules. Talk to your Salesforce admin to learn more about these tools and where it makes sense to implement them.

Third, and most important, focus on people-based solutions for maintaining quality data. Everyone who works in a Salesforce org shares responsibility for its data. And don’t forget that good data starts at the top of an organization. Nonprofit leaders should make sure that data hygiene schedules are in place and that ownership of data maintenance is distributed across the organization.

If your Salesforce data is untrustworthy, then you won’t be able to gain accurate insights from your Salesforce org—and that’s why you’re earning this badge in the first place, right?

Data collection and maintenance aren’t easy, but they’re achievable. The result of having reliable data makes it all worthwhile. And lucky for you, this module is all about the Salesforce tools you can use to show the real return on your effort.

In the next unit, learn how to use NPSP reporting to find, format, and customize reports to meet your organization’s unique needs.

Resources

• Racial Equity Tools Website: Data Collection Methods
• Trailhead: Data Quality
• Trailhead: Duplicate Management
• Salesforce Help: NPSP Reporting and Analytics