Clean data is vital to all industries, but especially for nonprofits. For nonprofit organizations, data can be both a strategic asset and a huge potential challenge. The complicating factor for nonprofits is that they typically have limited budget and resources to deal with data – yet, data is how they raise funds and connect with stakeholders.
Your data can be used to help your organization decide where to invest precious resources, or it can be rendered useless by duplicates, errors, and missing data. Salesforce offers lots of powerful tools and functionalities to help your organization take full advantage of your data as a catalyst for organization-wide improvement as part of the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, but it will only be as useful as the data you put in. Â
A data-first culture that goes beyond clean data is critical but involves changing mindsets and habits and making data part of the daily workflow. The fact of the matter is that data is complex and detailed. There will be moments where you feel like data is basically doing its best to get messy. This is why starting out with the right data, and having a plan in place to keep it healthy, is critical to helping your organization tap the potential of your data and become a truly data-driven nonprofit.Â
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach for improving data quality, you will need to come up with a plan which includes the right mix of training, monitoring, and regular cleanup to maintain good data health. Remember, data maintenance is a team sport, and as your team is using the Nonprofit Cloud, they will likely be preoccupied with their day-to-day work and try to take some shortcuts with data entry. They will almost certainly run into unanticipated situations that require them to make decisions about how to enter data. Â
Our Co-founder and President Steve Pogrebivsky recently published an article to the Salesforce ecosystem on Medium, Why Clean Data is Vital for Nonprofits Using Salesforce, which can serve as a useful introduction to the importance of data quality for nonprofits. It is a great way to learn about how data quality fits into reaching your donors, fundraising, reporting, and other crucial activities for nonprofit organizations. Â
Get started today with a free trial of DataGroomr to discover how easy it is! No set-up required. Once you log into your Salesforce database with DataGroomr, duplicates begin to disappear. DataGroomr offers discounted pricing for nonprofits.Â