A great house will only last if it’s built on a great foundation. Yet, we don’t see that foundation and forget it’s there. That’s the same as data standards – setting processing in place that control how, when, and where data are collected and stored. If you have different ways of defining, collecting, and processing data, it’s like making part of your foundation from sand, part from stone, part above ground, part below ground, and part not even finished yet! All too soon, the house will come down.
So join Dave Saraiva, a co-founder and chief of products at the nonprofit CRM Driven, for an in-depth yet approachable discussion on how to get started with creating, implementing, and maintaining standards of data collection. We discuss the following steps to developing data standards:
- Build a team that contains representation from:
- Senior leadership, to supply the connection to the org’s strategy
- Folks with some history of the organization, to supply institutional knowledge
- Data collectors, to understand challenges of the process
- Data users, to make sure data standards support necessary analytics
- Operations, to cover any data that’s used in organizational activities
- Once the team is assembled, start in reverse order with:
- what the organizational strategy is,
- how the data will ultimately be used to achieve that strategy,
- what data is needed, and finally
- how that data will be collected and processed.
You can connect to Dave on LinkedIn here.
Check out Driven if you’re looking for a new CRM here.
Dave Saraiva is a co-founder and chief of products at the nonprofit CRM Driven. He devoted to supporting nonprofits develop both the tools and the skills to collect, manage, and utilize critical data that will help them succeed.
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