There isn’t anything quite as powerful in your nonprofit as your data, and yet nothing can be as frustrating to work with!
If you haven’t heard of KonMari, it is a popular home organising method by Japanese consultant Marie Kondo. She has written four books on organising and has a popular Netflix series, it’s worth checking out. Marie’s method involves systematically organising by categories e.g. clothing, books, papers, komono (miscellaneous) and sentimental items.
When it comes to organising and storing your data we can learn a lot from this approach of working systematically. The daunting task of organising data is about asking the right questions and stepping out the process into chunks of work.
Asking the right questions is a great place to start, here are just a few questions included in my spreadsheet to get you started:
- How is my data currently managed or stored? E.g. spreadsheet, CRM, marketing platform, fundraising platform etc
- What is the cause of frustration?
- Do I need to see a complete picture of this data segment? E.g. does this data interact with other segments or stand alone?
- What is the priority of getting this data sorted?
- How realistic am I on timeframes and resources to get this completed?
I’ve created a spreadsheet that can help you to start planning out the organisation and migration of your data. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a great place to start. Let me know what you think and if there’s anything you think would be useful to add.
Download the Excel spreadsheet