In the digital era, data has become the key to success even for—or maybe especially for—the nonprofit. Data helps organizations drive their campaigns, manage activities, and run impactful programs that benefit people in need. However, a cluttered database can lead to discrepancies and severely affect a nonprofit’s operations. It is imperative to keep your database clean and organized for effective engagement and to conduct impactful programs.
Bad data can affect your team's work capacity and derail your volunteers into spending hours on nonproductive activity. Gartner's recent studies show that charitable organizations lose nearly 14.2 million dollars every year due to bad data that hinders their operations and leads the management to make bad decisions. It directly affects the organization’s reputation, relationships with the donors, work management, and most of all, it waters down the impact that could have been made on people's lives.
What is clean data?
Clean data is just that: devoid of error, factual, derived from reputable sources, and representative of the essential data needed by the organization. It helps to frame effective strategies and guides your team to make the right decisions at the right moment. Here are the key characteristics of clean data:
- Validity. The data should be relevant and originate from a trusted source. Your operations depend on your data, which requires the data to be accurate and useful.
- Completeness. Half-truths can put your organization in deep trouble. Therefore, it is essential that the required data is complete, accurate and doesn't miss any key elements.
- Consistency. The data should be consistent and belong to the same dataset to help your team reply on data for their activities.
- Uniformity. The data should be organized and well-segmented to avoid difficulties in accessing it.
Data cleaning tools and software
A data cleansing tool can help you improve the quality of your nonprofit’s data by untangling it and providing a visual data representation. Tools like the NPSP Health Check and exception dashboards help you calibrate the database and conduct periodic checkups of your database to ensure it remains clean. It establishes easy data access for better scheduling, monitoring, and managing the data flow across education institutions and organizations. Using a data monitoring tool saves considerable time and resources for administration. It assists data analysts to find relevant insights from the database to help the campaigns drive results.
DemandBlue's Exception Dashboard Implementation to the Rescue
DemandBlue helps you keep your database neat and clean with our exception dashboard accelerator. It enables you to display and highlight specific records and items that do not match or align with the standards and mission of your organization. The DemandBlue team helps you segregate and segment records for an interactive view of your database. Exception dashboards also enables you to eliminate discrepancies such as duplicate records and missing data to help you clean your data quickly and to identify areas for improvements or for training your staff.
