Gemma Hogan, Associate Manager at Salesforce.org considers how voluntary organisations can make better use of data.
Salesforce.org now offers nonprofit data solutions to help teams unlock the potential of their data and make it more usable and impactful.
In a digital-first world, nonprofits and charities are increasingly realising the importance of data management plans. Yet, fewer than 25% of organisations report having a plan according to our recent findings meaning data is rarely used to make decisions or predict the future behaviour of stakeholders.
In our recent whitepaper, we share more on how we help nonprofits build a data management plan that can allow them to create more impact and become more data-driven.
DELIVER MORE IMPACT WITH DATA
An effective data management plan considers your mission, staffing, time, budget, goals, existing technology, and more.
Some of the benefits of a plan include:
- Being able to better analyse and visualise your entire operations to make more data-informed decisions
- Make engagement campaigns more compelling by activating data for predictive insights
- Improve operational efficiencies to streamline your business workflows
- Putting trust at the centre of everything you do by ensuring stakeholder data is secure and compliant.
TAKING A SIMPLE THREE-STEP APPROACH
Contrary to popular belief, building a data management plan doesn’t have to be complex. Instead, focus on data maturity, inventory and governance.
The whitepaper goes into greater detail on how to approach these three areas including a data maturity scale to give an understanding of how data quality, usage behaviours and culture all play a role. A sample data inventory template is also shared.
As mentioned throughout, building and iterating on a strategy takes time. Ranking priorities to ensure they are attainable is important with small and consistent wins being the building blocks of major results over time.
FROM STRATEGY TO INFRASTRUCTURE
When you have created a data strategy, the next area to look at is data infrastructure which are the tools your nonprofit will use to realise your data strategy goals.
Infrastructure areas explored include:
- How to store and unify data
- Ways to activate and bring data to life in the form of analytics and
- What integrations might be needed
Examples of putting infrastructure into practice include data hygiene and security right through to how you integrate your data with Nonprofit Cloud as an example. The tools an organisation will need depend on your data maturity, organisation size, IT capacity, and the specific goals of your data strategy plan.
Salesforce’s Nonprofit Operations solutions can help you achieve your goal of becoming a data-driven nonprofit with solutions across all data use cases.
Read the white paper, Building a Data Management Strategy for Your Nonprofit.
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