Data that is loved tends to survive. Who loves their data? Raise your hand if you love your data. I do. I do. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome to today's short course on data hygiene, best practices and easy wins. My name is Vidya Kagan and I will be your presenter today. I come to this webinar with more than 20 years of experience in the advancement space. I've worked for higher ed institutions as well as local independent schools. My experience includes everything from annual giving to capital campaigns, from stewardship to events to publications. Currently, I am director of Development Services at Menlo School, a small independent school in the heart of Silicon Valley, California. Out of all the different things that I've done in my fundraising career, I have to say that data is my favorite. My job today involves data, databases, research, reporting, analytics, everything you can think of that involves data. I love data, and one of the reasons is because I love helping people, both the folks within my development office as well as the people throughout my school. Let me go back to the quote that I started this webinar with. Data that is loved tends to survive from Dr. Kurt Volker. Dr. Volker is a computer scientist who received his Ph.D. in Computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. I really like his quote, and I agree with him 100%. I would add just a little bit more on to his quote. Data that is loved tends to survive. Data that is loved can be useful, helpful, valuable, empowering to you and your organization. Data that is loved is valuable in making data driven decisions for you and your team. Let's review today's agenda. I will start with a couple of definitions and explanations about data hygiene, and then I'll launch into challenges and opportunities that we probably all face in our organizations. Finally, I will conclude with a top five list of best practices and easy wins that I hope you and your colleagues can implement at your organization sometime soon. Now, what exactly is that? Data hygiene. It's a funny term, that's for sure. After Googling and reading and listening to many different people talking about data and data hygiene, I came across this definition, which I think captures data hygiene best. The underlying phrases are words that I think specifically apply to our work as advancement services professionals and are key to understanding data and data hygiene accurate, complete and reliable data. That is our goal. Our goal is to have accurate, complete and reliable data in our CRM for us to use and for our colleagues to use it. In addition to inputting data, we also on occasion have to clean, update or even remove data. This is also part of our job as advancement services professionals. This also falls into data hygiene. Finally, the last phrase up to date and accurate. Isn't that what we all want? We all want current data and accurate data in order to do our work most efficiently and productively. Now, why is data hygiene important? Several reasons. First, better engagement. If you have clean data in your system, you can engage on a more personal level and a more accurate level with your constituents. Think about my school, for example. If I'm reaching out to an alum to say Hello, welcome to campus, come for a reunion. It helps if I have the correct email address and perhaps even that alumni spouse's name as well as class year. All of that information is critical for me in order to craft a proper email and a personal email to this particular alone. And the better email I have, the better engaged the alumni will be. Data hygiene is also important for communication. If you have a clean, accurate and reliable data in your CRM that everybody on your team will use your CRM. The communication amongst your teammates, amongst your colleagues in your organization will become better and more fluid. People won't have their own list, their own Google sheets, their own hard copies and file folders. If you have accurate, clean and reliable data in your CRM, you can enable better communication among your team. Finally, data hygiene and clean data is important in order to save time and save money. If you have clean data in your system, for example, a correct email address or a correct phone number, then you know the first time that you pick up the phone and call that person, you know you'll reach that person. You won't waste time trying to find a new number. Same with emails. You won't have to waste time sorting through your emails and looking at bounced emails and trying to figure out a new email address for this person. Keeping your data clean also helps you to save money if you keep your data and database clean on a regular basis, then you won't have to hire a vendor or an intern and spend thousands of dollars for them to clean your database. All in all, clean data is something that is a part of our jobs as advancement services professionals and clean data helps all of us make more informed decisions. Now, I understand there are challenges, especially in nonprofits. There are challenges to keeping our data and database clean. One challenges that we don't have enough time. Data hygiene takes a lot of time and a lot of focused time. For example, if I have a big data project, I like to keep my door shut, minimize distractions and hunker down and focus on the task at hand. Sometimes I'll need one, two, or even 3 hours to complete my work. This is the way I do things so that I can ensure that I get things done right the first time and that everything in the database is clean. I understand, though, it's hard to find that kind of time in your day. Sometimes data hygiene is not a priority. As advancement services professionals, we always have something that's more pressing. Perhaps there's a board meeting on Friday and you're bored. And today is Monday and your boss says, I need a report tomorrow for the board meeting. Guess what? That becomes number one to do on your to do list. Maybe it's your head of school who says, Hey, I'm meeting with this donor this afternoon. Do you think you could get me a giving history report for him in the next 5 minutes? Guess what? That becomes your number one priority in the in the morning, instead of the data project you might be anticipating working on. There's always something more pressing that needs to be done. Finally, typically in nonprofits, there aren't enough staff to do all the work that needs to be done. Nonprofits typically run lean and mean and have just enough staff to get the work done. Data hygiene is rarely something that appears on people's job descriptions. I'm lucky here at Menlo. I work in development services as well as my colleague. The two of us have data hygiene on our job descriptions. It is a part of our everyday work. I realized that we are the lucky situation and that we we have two people looking at data all the time and that's how we keep the database clean. Now, with challenges also come opportunities. I like this quote from Carly Fiorina. The goal is to turn data into information and information into insight. The only way to get information and insight from your data is to make sure that your data is clean. Data hygiene has to be a priority. Now let's look at my top five list of best practices and easy wins. I hope this is helpful to you and I hope that you can take some of these to your colleagues and implement them in your organization in the coming weeks. First, it's important to create data entry standards or standard operating procedures. Yes, this takes time, but in the end it is worth it. It's important for you and your colleagues as advancement services professionals when you're inputting data to make sure that everything is input in a standardized way. It's also important for your other advancement colleagues to know how data should look in the system. If they spot an error, for example, someone's name is uncapitalized, they can alert you so it can be fixed. If they see something that's incomplete, for example, an address that has a city but no state. They'll notice that, hey, this is not following our data entry standards and they can alert you to fill in the address appropriately. The second item here is to eliminate duplicate records. There are vendors and apps out there that can connect to your CRM to help you eliminate dupes. If you eliminate duplicate records, that will, number one, make your database more clean. And number two, save you a lot of time. If you have five entries for, let's say, Stanford University, that means you have to click on each entry in order to get a full picture of what Stanford University has given to Menlo School. If you eliminate the duplicates, then you only have to click on one Stanford University and that will tell you everything that you need to know. The third tip I have is to use mass updates and to use automation to accomplish this task. Mass updates refers to taking a big group of records and updating them all at once. Using Automation. I'll give you an example. At my school every June, the seniors graduate. We have to turn those folks in our database from current students into alumni. Instead of going into each record one by one, which takes a lot of time and will present human error, we use automation to take all 150 graduates and turn their constituency code from student to alumni. Doing it this way saves a lot of time and results in more accurate data. Fourth, create a calendar of data entry Busy times. This is important for you as an advancement services professional to calendar your work and block time off on your calendar to do this important work. Do this important focused work, as I mentioned in an earlier slide. It's also important so that your colleagues know what you're working on and when you're working on it, and when they can expect the clean data to be available. For example, in the summer, we get a list of our new students and new parents who will be joining our school in the fall. We spend a good three or four weeks. My advancement Services colleague and I working on that data, making sure all the data gets into the system properly, into our CRM and is clean making sure salutations are correct, making sure the children are correct, connected to the correct parents, and maybe even a sibling, making sure emails and phone numbers are present for all of the above. We alert our colleagues at the beginning of the summer to tell them, Hey, we'll be working on this this summer, the whole month of July. You can expect to see all of our new students and our new parents beautifully input into the database by the beginning of August. This helps all of us to plan our work and to move forward. Finally, I suggest that everyone makes data hygiene a regular part of your work. As I mentioned earlier, we're lucky at Menlo. My colleague and I are both on the Advancement Services team and we have data hygiene on our job responsibilities. That is the way we are. We've also trained, taught and taught our colleagues to be the same. If they get a new email address, they alert us right away and we'll update the system. If I call a phone number and it's not working, I'll make a note to find a new phone number and I'll update it right away. When one of us is running a mailing list, maybe we notice that someone's name is misspelled or not capitalized. We fix it right then and there in our CRM. It could even be a conversation. My head of school may have met with somebody and said, Hey, did you know? I just learned they're moving from Los Angeles to San Francisco next month. You know what? In a month from now, I'm going to call my head of school and get that new address. If you make data hygiene a regular part of your work, the data will always be clean, useful and valuable. The data will help you make better decisions for your organization. In conclusion, there are many benefits to keeping data and data hygiene at the top of your list. Improve data quality, increased productivity, better engagement and communication with your internal and external constituents, and time and money savings. This quote comes from the same active campaign article that I referenced earlier. Maintaining data hygiene is a critical part of any data driven strategy. Thank you very much for listening today. I really hope that this webinar has been helpful to you and I hope that you'll be able to take some of these best practices and easy wins to work and make these items a part of your daily work for you and your colleagues. Please feel free to reach out any time if you want to talk about data. My LinkedIn and email are on the screen here and I would love to hear from you. Thank you very much. Take care.

data hygiene

best practices

clean and accurate data

engagement and communication

data quality