To truly maximize your resources, increase your impact, and make positive changes to your operations, you must learn how to put your organization’s data into action. The best way to do that is to cultivate a data-driven culture at your organization, where your organization’s actions, at every level, are guided by data insights rather than intuition or assumptions.
To embrace the nonprofit data analytics process and ensure your entire team is on board with using data to improve how you operate, you’ll need the right strategy on your side. Let’s dive into four tips for creating a data-driven culture.
1. Define why data matters for your organization.
First, take a step back and identify why it’s important to your nonprofit to prioritize its data when making decisions. Doing this will help align your actions with your mission as you implement a data-driven culture.
Here are some common reasons data matters to nonprofits:
- Enhanced efficiency: Allowing your data to guide your actions means you can identify inefficiencies, streamline workflows, and save time and resources.
- More successful outreach: Strong marketing is essential to nonprofit success. When you use the data you have on your donors, their past actions, and their communication preferences to inform your outreach, you can deliver more relevant content that inspires action in specific groups.
- Better donor engagement: Understanding donor behavior, preferences, and giving patterns can help you connect donors with giving and involvement opportunities that will resonate with them and result in high retention rates.
- Increased fundraising success: Use your data to track fundraising performance, optimize campaigns, and identify more high-potential donors, allowing you to generate more revenue for your work.
- A fuller understanding of program impact: To ensure you’re delivering your mission effectively, actively measure and analyze the impact of your programs. By doing this, you can track outcomes and identify areas for improvement.
- Stronger stakeholder relationships: Board members, donors, volunteers, and community leaders want to see that their engagement with your cause makes a difference. By tracking and sharing your organization’s data, you can secure and maintain their trust.
Most importantly, as you get into the habit of using data to assess your performance and make positive changes to your operations, you can more effectively plan for the future. This means embracing a data-driven culture can set you up for long-term sustainability and success.
2. Secure leadership buy-in.
To transform your organization’s working culture and make the use of data a priority across all teams, you’ll need the support of your organization’s leadership. Get them involved early by discussing how data is currently being used at your nonprofit and your vision for the future of your organization.
You’ll also need to demonstrate how shifting toward a more data-driven culture will be a wise investment of time and energy. For instance, walk your leadership through how a data-driven approach directly supports your nonprofit’s mission and current strategic objectives. Or, highlight that leveraging your data properly gives your organization a competitive advantage when it comes to fundraising, community engagement, and program development.
Since overhauling several processes at once can be a daunting prospect, be prepared to explain to your leadership that you can start your culture transformation with small, easy-to-implement data initiatives that drive positive results. Here are a few examples of projects you might propose:
- Using past fundraising campaign data to improve your next campaign to see how quickly it leads to higher donations
- Monitoring social media analytics to identify which content types generate the most engagement so you can adjust your marketing strategy accordingly
- Leveraging a tool like Google Analytics to monitor which website pages receive the most traffic and then making informed changes like simplifying navigation or optimizing high-traffic action pages like your donation page
As your leadership team sees the value of your data in action, you’ll be able to slowly adopt more data-driven projects and processes so that making the most of your data becomes a priority for everyone in your organization.
3. Invest in the right tools.
Having a robust nonprofit technology stack will be essential as your team uses data extensively in its daily work. Take the opportunity to critically evaluate your current solutions and identify any gaps between them.
In some instances, you may need to take advantage of the full functionality of certain tools, build custom integrations between multiple platforms, or invest in new tools so that you’re able to accomplish more with your data.
Here are a few key tools you’ll want to have in your technology stack as you use your data more and more:
- A constituent relationship management (CRM) system for collecting data on donors, volunteers, members, and more
- AI-backed prospect research tools to help you identify, cultivate, and steward more high-potential donors with a high level of accuracy
- Data analytics and visualization tools to look at large volumes of data and identify trends and patterns
- Data warehousing solutions to consolidate data from various solutions (fundraising tools, program tracking software, communications solutions) into a single repository
- Survey and other feedback tools for collecting insights directly from your community
- Marketing platforms with reporting capabilities so you can monitor the effectiveness of different outreach strategies
- Financial management tools to track donations, expenses, and grants
In addition to having the right tools on your side, you’ll also need to build clear processes for collecting, managing, and analyzing data. For example, create a thorough data hygiene policy that ensures your data stays organized and accurate. You should also set goals for different aspects of your operations and regularly monitor your progress by reviewing key performance indicators (KPIs) you see in your data.
4. Cultivate data literacy across the organization.
To have a true data-driven culture at your organization, staff at all levels must be comfortable working with your nonprofit’s data sources and making informed, data-backed decisions. Of course, this will happen over time as your entire organization embraces a shift toward using data more regularly, but there are steps you can take to begin cultivating data literacy across your teams.
These steps are:
- Establish the value of data by having leaders discuss high-level data insights in team meetings and showcase its impact on decision-making and your organization’s larger goals.
- Provide ongoing training to staff on how to make the most of your organization’s data, relying on various mediums (online courses, in-person workshops, etc.) to appeal to different learning styles.
- Ensure that your data is easily accessible to all team members in a secure, organized way and that simple dashboards or reports make it easy for anyone to interpret the information.
- Encourage departments to share data with each other, breaking down silos between teams to allow everyone a more holistic view of your nonprofit’s operations.
- Recognize and celebrate when staff use data effectively to drive decisions or improve outcomes, reinforcing the importance of data literacy.
As you encourage your team members to embrace data in their roles, listen for their feedback on the processes you’re implementing and the training you’re offering. Based on their responses, adjust your approach so it’s more approachable for all staff members and more sustainable for your organization in the long run.
Is data an underutilized resource at your organization? If it is, you may be missing out on the many benefits of studying the information your organization collects and making decisions based on your insights. Use the tips above to make a positive change and create a data-driven culture at your organization at all levels of your operations.
About the Author
Carl Diesing, Managing Director – Carl co-founded DNL OmniMedia in 2006 and has grown the team to accommodate clients with ongoing web development projects. Together DNL OmniMedia has worked with over 100 organizations to assist them with accomplishing their online goals. As Managing Director of DNL OmniMedia, Carl works with nonprofits and their technology to foster fundraising, create awareness, cure disease, and solve social issues. Carl lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife Sarah and their two children Charlie and Evelyn.