Grantmakers, it’s time to focus on data health

Blackbaud recently released the whitepaper How Grantmakers can Improve Data Health and Maximise Impact and it’s causing many in the industry to take a closer look at the health of their data.

Foundations and other grantmaking organisations collect data from grantees, staff, board members, and other key stakeholders. And some organisations have been doing it for decades!

Gathering and tracking this data effectively can be an arduous task, especially when it involves paper-based systems or comes from multiple online applications that are not connected to each other.

But if you focus on data health, it can spell a host of benefits for your organisation.

High-quality data and flexible data collection are at the heart of most success stories – and for good reasons. It can streamline workflows and simplify stakeholder communication. It can help you gather true business intelligence. It informs decision-making and assists you to respond rapidly to a dynamic granting environment. And so much more.

To use your data in impactful ways, there are three dimensions to strong data health you must follow:

Data Quality

The quality of your data is crucial to strong data health. Data needs to be kept accurate, with the ability to easily detect and repair any inaccurate data. It also needs to be complete, where all important data fields are populated, leaving no missing values.

You also need to ensure all data entries follow the same structure and business rules, particularly over time. Also make sure you keep your data current via timely data entry, and capture changes effectively through strategic data collection.

Scope 

Ensure that you are collecting and storing sufficient data to meet your organisation’s needs. Discuss the scope of your data with the different teams in your organisation, to determine exactly what data is needed to help progress the organisation further.

Your data scope needs to be broad enough to support a wide range of use cases – management reporting, program status and workflow, communication with all stakeholders, qualitative data for storytelling, grant governance, evaluation and impact measurement.

Structure

To serve your operational and analytical requirements, your data must be correctly interrelated. Granting data that is structured around an underlying CRM enables powerful grantee-based reporting.

Well-structured data from a ‘single source of truth’ can be assembled into a wide range of views and reports to support the entire granting lifecycle. Visualising your data in this way provides great insight into what’s happening at your organisation, and it can save you time by putting key information at your fingertips.

For more insights on how to improve your data health, download Blackbaud’s free whitepaper How Grantmakers can Improve Data Health and Maximise Impact now.