Sign-up for The Technopath Way Weekly Newsletter here: technopath.ac-page.com/the-technopath-way-sign-up

Sarah and Marley's discussion ranges from how Americorps Vista can help nonprofits scale up without the financial burden of extra employees to data collection and governance. Marley mentions some of her favorite tools as a Salesforce nonprofit consultant and how she uses them to make life easier while helping nonprofits use their powerful data to move their missions forward.

Episode Notes

Data Governance for nonprofits, Salesforce vs Raiser’s Edge

•Having a data specialist, separate from your system administrator, means your organization can stay focused on moving the mission forward. A data specialist will ask the right questions and take all things ‘data’ off your plate.
•Americorps Vista – Labor intensive up front, but it is a more cost effective way to try out having a data specialist in your organization. It is typically a less experienced person volunteering through the federal government to gain experience. Your organization will typically pay a small monthly stipend as well as specific reporting and documentation for the government in exchange for the less monetarily intense help of a data specialist building your capacity.

What does a data specialist do?
•Asks the right questions:
oWhat data do we need to capture?
oHow long do we need to keep it?
oDo we have any regulations we need to be in compliance with because of the nature of our nonprofit?
•Ensures the organization is taking the long view and the wide view of what types of data it needs to collect and how it will store/use them.
•Makes sure your data is secure, safe and meaningful.

Biggest challenges nonprofits typically face in terms of data:
•Data governance really shouldn’t be owned by just one person in your organization, like your system administrator. It should be owned by all key stakeholders so everyone knows the state of data in your organization.
•Making a game plan/road map for where things are headed.
•Answering the difficult questions of “what data should we really have and how long should we be keeping it?”
•Always be planning for your growth and the data collection that comes along with it.
•As organizations grow they often realize they collected or kept data they didn’t really need and could have actually streamlined a lot of their processes to better serve their clients.

How should organizations document their data?
•A data dictionary
olabor intensive, but extremely useful to be able to pass on to others
oIn short, a data dictionary describe a table’s columns based on common traits (i.e name, definition, data type) within another table. Admins use data dictionaries when a data table is simply too large to view directly. Data dictionaries allow readers to understand complex databases without having to investigate each column. You can think of them as a summary of data about data.
•Field Trip
oThis is an app through Salesforce’s AppExchange that shows you what percentage each field is being used
•Doing regular audits of what systems are set up and whether or not they are important to our organization.

Tips for Taming the Data Overwhelm
•Data is a long game, you have time, data is fixable, extremely difficult to break
•Approach data in little chunks so you have time to think about the implications, plan and discuss it with stakeholders.

Differences between Raiser’s Edge and Salesforce
•Salesforce customize the client journey over time as you grow. Raiser’s Edge is mostly geared toward internal tracking and segmenting for marketing.
•Salesforce can bring clients in through digital experiences, and is much more flexible in terms of interacting with clients.
•Raiser’s Edge is much easier to use right out of the box and does not require the same level of computer savvy and programming that Salesforce does, however this can become restrictive. Salesforce needs to be set up and customized before it can really be used.
•Raiser’s Edge means you’ll need to conform your organization’s processes to how it collects and organizes data. Salesforce can conform to your organization’s unique processes.

Marley’s Go-To Salesforce tools
•Elements – Great for admins or consultants who do a lot of building. It connects to your org and remaps Salesforce for you so you gather across many different objects and fields. You can review your automation and is a much simpler view of your Salesforce org but still provides documentation for you to provide to end users. It simplifies your admin work.
•DemandTools - (nonprofit pricing) – Great for data migrations. It lets you find IDs to use in your data loader and helps you with finding duplicates across all data fields and objects and merging them. It lets you use starter scripts that are extremely customizable, but that give you a great starting point. It makes data maintenance so much easier with a good, broad view. Let’s you view in more of an Excel sheet that is easily editable.

Organizing Tools
•White boards – at least 2, what am I working on today, what am I keeping an eye on, longer term.

Marley’s Cause
•Foster Children and the nonprofits that support them
oTogether We Rise
oCovenant House – Supports homeless youth