fundraising
How to Improve the Quality of Your Data
The first couple months of the New Year is a good time for reflection and strategy adjustment. For many phonathon programs, it marks the half way point of the fiscal year, when goals start to coalesce and your objectives seem within reach or where a fall plagued with issues start to manifest into a worrisome revised forecast.
For those experiencing the latter, how do you get your program back on track? Unfortunately, traveling back in time isn’t an option, and hoping that your spring plan will just naturally perform better than the fall isn’t a real strategy.
While there are many tactics and strategies an organization can implement to boost results, the most overlooked is how to improve the quality of your data. Improving data quality doesn’t require an increased pledge rate or a higher average pledge. It just means that more people hear your message, and that translates into more donors and more dollars. To understand the impact of data quality, I’ve always encouraged organizations to take a hard look at the opportunity cost of bad data to determine how much they could realize by finding constituents “lost” to the phonathon. Here’s the simplest way to do it:
- Step 1: Determine the volume of records by donor type you didn’t load in your phonathon due to the lack of an accurate phone number. Next, add in all the records coded as disconnected or wrong numbers this fall. The sum is going to probably be a bit shocking…so will determining the opportunity cost of not being able to solicit them.
- Step 2: Once you have those figures, we recommend using a calculator (like the one we created, below) where you can look at your records lost and build in assumptions regarding “what if” you found new phone numbers for a percent of those non-phonable constituents.
- Step 3: From there, you input the metrics you know are achievable based on past results, and just like that, you have a realistic opportunity cost that you can influence.
- Step 4: Take a deep breath, and then determine how many of these prospects you need to find this year.
Now go find your “lost” donors, and watch your phonathon thrive this spring.