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hello everyone and welcome to our webinar for February 20 nineteen percent it as a partnership between build consulting and community IT innovators in this webinar built Consulting's panel of experts will be answering the questions you submitted regarding improving your nonprofit CRM data management in 2019 you can read more information about this topic in our blog a link will be provided near the end of this webinar and if your specific question wasn't addressed during today's session please contact us for an answer links for contact methods also appear near the end of this webinar just a few housekeeping notes before we get started feel free to ask questions via chat we'll try to weave a few additional questions and as we go try to avoid multitasking you may just miss the best part of the presentation and as always links to recordings and the recording of this webinar and the slides will be shared via email after the webinar now just a little bit quickly about community IT and build consulting we both work exclusively with nonprofit organizations to help them make information technology and system decisions that support their mission we have a collaborative approach empowering our clients to make informed of choices for their organizations community IT is focused on providing outsourced network management technical support services build consulting leads in the social good sector by providing three types of services we serve as part-time or interim chief information officers for nonprofits we perform business process technology and data projects ranging from strategic assessments and tech roadmaps to system selections and implementations and with teams we provide outsourced data managers with deep development operations experience and nonprofit CRM expertise and it's members of our build teams groups that are going to be your panelists for today's conversation my name is Peter Morris and I'm serving as the moderator for today's discussion I'm happy to welcome three of my colleagues from build consulting who will be serving as our panel of experts for today's session Kyle hey everyone excuse me I have a little bit of a cold so you will be hearing some sniffling and some coughing on today's call but I am going to do my best to bring my 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time energy to today's conversation I joining today's call because I began my career working in nonprofit CRM and my interest in it has continued and grown over the years but one thing that has stayed constant for me is really understanding how today's topic around nonprofit data management how it's critical to get that right and to do a really excellent job at managing nonprofit data to be able to do some of the other things that we that we hear our clients wanting to be able to do and I've gotten to learn a lot from Joe and Sarah who are on today's call so I'm just I'm really excited to have a conversation today and hear their perspective and share a little bit more about mine thanks Kyle Jill I'm got to noon everybody my name is Joe Butler and I'm really looking forward to answering your questions and talking about topic that I really like to geek out about which is data management don't adjust your speakers I do in fact have a slight accent I moved to the DC area from the Gulf Coast Australia in 2002 and since have been working with nonprofits exclusively specifically embedding myself among the development operation fundraising donor relations departments I've been with builds for a little over two years now and work with the build teams offering that helps organizations use and interpret their data more effectively I'm happy to be here and thanks so much for having me thanks Joe Sarah hi everyone my name is sara luis and I'm relatively new to build consulting but I've spent the last six years or so focusing on database hygiene at various nonprofits primarily was in the razor's edge but other CRMs as well and I'm really excited to be a panelist on today's webinar to help answer some questions that I myself have often had during my time working with nonprofits thanks Sara just a couple of quick foundational ideas that we'd like to share with you before we get started answering the questions that were submitted in advance of the webinar the first is this formula which we often share with clients and when we speak to nonprofit organizations it stands for old organization plus new technology equals expensive old organization and we just share this to underscore that even though technology is important to organizational transformation is critical to the success of any organization when considering technology and successful transformation involves a variety of things which you can see on the screen here leadership and governance operations process data and technology and technology is deliberately put last because if everything upstream of that isn't properly attended to then the chance of technology failure is much higher and in fact nonprofit technology projects in an opera in the sector fail at a rate of over 50% and now we're going to get onto your questions we received roughly 20 excellent questions in advance from registrants which we boiled down into nine that we'll plan on answering during this session and if we have extra time we'll take additional live questions from the audience we had over 80 registrants 30 of which are attending today we had a lot of snow and winter weather during the DC area where a lot of our audience comes from so again this will be available after as a recording and we thank you who are able to attend for your participation this is an informal collaborative discussion if you would like a more comprehensive answer to a particular question or an answer that speaks more directly to your individual situation please do contact us and we'll be happy to dialogue with you so the first question we're going to address today is how do I get my organization to understand how important our CRM database is Sarah would you like to take the first crack at answering this question yeah thanks Peter I think I would say that the very first step is going to be senior leadership buy-in so really getting them to understand that your CRM is the absolute most important piece of maintaining and creating those quality relationships with your constituents and then from there kind of driving that positive change from the top down and just to be clear when I'm saying constituents I'm talking about anyone in your database whether that's your organization's members volunteers event attendees etc and then I would also just add that there can sometimes be feelings of resentment within an organization if people feel as if a CRM is kind of being forced on them without any real acknowledgement of the hard work that goes into a thriving database that can really go a long way in ensuring that individuals and teams are all feeling engaged and that everyone has a clear sense of what the return on investment is going to be for the organization so this is Joe I believe that the best way to help people to understand CRMs benefit is to demonstrate how it can improve and support their work and I see this a lot it's the classic you know what's in it for me mentality staff don't adopt the new system because they don't understand like what it can offer them so I would spend some time explaining LC everyone will benefit them directly and not just the organization as a whole so explain to each department how valuable the CRM can be to their responsibilities specifically and help make the connection to how their use rolls up and informs your organization's use of that data to ultimately help your mission this is Kyle and I think I would add that for some organizations maybe the way to ask the question of senior leadership going back to what you said Sarah is could we serve constituents better if we used CRM better if the organization doesn't think the answer is yes then perhaps you have a huge problem if the answer is yes if people say we can actually use this to make meaningful changes in how the organization engages with and interacts with constituents I think taking the time to actually spell out what that means is important so this can mean a couple the way I think of it they can mean a couple of different things it can be looking at what the cost savings might look like if you were serving constituents better or even better if you can figure out that there's going to be a return on investment if you can figure out how this might actually drive revenue that's the best way in my view to get senior leadership engaged back to again what Sarah said at the outset I found it's just easier to engage organizations around what the opportunities are rather than just making the case that this will make us work faster a lot of folks in senior leadership positions have heard that argument before and not seen any return on that and something you said Joe that I thought was interesting that I hadn't really thought about was spending more time with staff at either the team level or individually and I'm wondering is there anything you've done that you think would work well so yeah I in the past have asked to join their department or team meetings for the first ten minutes and sort of show and tell how to do something relative to their processes in the system so show them a cool feature or report that will improve their team's efficiency we've also tried hosting sort of a lunchtime show-and-tell some nonprofits called on brown bags that highlight capabilities another tactic that we deployed had a client of build teams was through a point a superuser or a data steward in each department you can really help cheerlead system use and to help the enthusiasm come from you know various staff levels not just you know the one person drumming on about its use is that how it does I like that idea of a data steward I think that's really interesting that they're embedded in each department great cool thanks second question is what are some key trends that we see happening in the CRM space this last year in 2018 and what should we be planning for in this year this is interesting because I feel like this question comes up a lot and it it seems to be a perennial question and I saw a lot of the questions today in addition to this one being related to organizations who were talking about fundraising specifically and people who might be considering making a switch and I think an overarching comment is that a trend that I've seen going on for a number of years is that vendors are thinking about CRM more broadly than just fundraising and I think that this mirrors in some ways some of the ways that I see organizations thinking about CRM I just think we're seeing a definition of CRM that gets even more murkier as the boundaries of CRM technology is getting murkier so for one of my clients the boundaries of CRM are going to have to expand to include engagement via mobile apps engagement via client intake system engagement on Facebook and I think for now that's it and that gets overwhelming and so that's that's an example of how the boundaries of CRM I think are expanding both for our clients and also for the marketplace in general and secondly I think if you're thinking about making a change and planning for those change in preparing for those changes I would try to figure out what stuff was happening outside of my CRM and then focus on what it would mean to get that stuff into your CRM and as we always say and Peter mentioned earlier when he shared our information strategy before jumping to technology and making the assumption that it will just magically happen by making a technology change I would figure out all of the levers that the organization needs to pull to get the return on investment of making a change actually to materialize and then I think for the organization's on today's webinar I think there's some folks that are on the smaller side I think the last thing I'd say about trends is that we're seeing a lot more competition for your attention with seemingly new players every month and I would encourage those smaller organizations to walk not run to those solutions if you're going to make a switch make sure the technology is your real need and it's not something else related to process or data or senior leadership operations the other aspects of information strategy if I could jump in here I just wanted to talk about something that builders actively involved in which is testing out some new workflow functionality for a particular vendor and the workflow is sort of where users can instruct or configure the database to bake in certain tasks or actions to take place when specific triggers or things happen in the database so for example if a gift over five hundred dollars is made you know certain region once the workflow is set up the database can add an action to the fundraisers task list to call that individual or sort of even further they could the system could send out a highly personalized thank-you card by email to that donor and then log that interaction on the constituent records so that it's really cool things coming out in the pipeline and I personally am pretty excited to help organizations sort of leverage that capability in this coming year thanks Joe again don't forget folks you if you hear something that prompts another question for you or there's another question that you'd like to ask in general you can go ahead and use the chat features and GoToWebinar to submit it third question the marketing department is us to change CRM they don't seem to understand how difficult that would be what should we be communicating to them yes so first I would sort of be investigating - why they're pushing so hard for a new CRM if you have a solution currently what can it do for them that they think just getting another software could often times like just a changing technology isn't going to solve the underlying issues and although some people think of CRM is just technology it's so much more than that so I would help them consider the following which is like one do you have time to implement the CRM so smaller systems for smaller nonprofits may only need you know three to six months whereas larger scale organizations with multiple field offices or other systems that need to be integrated may need more than you know a year year-and-a-half and there's going to be many staff involved with this change so I would consider all the other activities that are going on within your organization - so you wouldn't want to implement a new CRM when you are launching a campaign or you have our you know your big 50th anniversary gala or database manager might be you know on absent because that will inevitably lead to an unsuccessful rollout the other thing that I would sort of try to articulate is before you implement a system you really need to know the total costs so you know that requires the upfront cost or the reoccurring costs to maintain but you need to run the numbers to gauge the potential return so how soon and to what degree will the system positively impact you know acquisition donations member retention rates he'll look further revenue how will it come if further revenue to achieve the return on the investment because usually it's not just the upfront fees or the monthly charges is also you know the amount of staff time working hours revenue that may be lost during implementation so I think you know trying to articulate and communicate it's not just you know buying something off the shelf that there's a lot of you know steps involved but I think Sarah you've been through multiple software changes right what do you what do you think yeah so I've been through a CRM conversion or two and one thing that we did well I would say was kind of speak up early and often about what we wanted out of a new CRM and then maybe something that we didn't do as well was really spend some quality time thinking about who all the stakeholders were and to what extent a change like this could impact each of them and the work that they do so we have a tool that we use and you can actually download it from our site and it's called a change management impact grid and it catalogs who's going to be impacted by a change and then also the extent of that impact so using this tool is going to look differently at every organization but in general everyone who will be impacted should feel like they got a voice whether that's asking for input via a survey or if it's having an actual seat at the table during software selection it can be surprising how extensive this part of the process can be for organizations and a lot of orgs kind of struggle with developing this list which is what makes it so important to use right from the onset since it really is the best way to kind of paint a really clear picture of everyone impacted by the implementation of new software Kyle did you have anything to add or yeah it's in sorry it's interesting I put myself on mute because I was going through one of my coughing fits but I was thinking about the change management impact grid and even using it on my projects it's always such an amazing prompter to really think through how a change is going to impact lots of folks within an organization or I should say all of the folks within an organization and I sort of chuckled when I saw this question because when I think about mark getting software while it's getting increasingly powerful it's nowhere near as foundational as CRM is for most nonprofits and so when a single department is pushing something I think it's really important going back to what you said Sarah to understand who all of the stakeholders are and how they're they impacted by the change and I think you know just to amplify a little bit the point that I made about it being a foundational tool it should be or CRM should be a tool for the entire organization and no single department whether it's marketing or development or programs no Department should get to push an organization towards a CRM solution that's centric to what they do and I don't obviously have all of the details of this particular situation but I would try to find a way to bring this conversation once again I'd bring it back up to the senior leadership team of the organization and make sure that they really understood what the tangible and intangible costs of making this change would be and that there really are measurable opportunities in making this change and lastly I would just add that I think there's a bunch of market marketers are notoriously prone to fall prey to marketing and there is a lot of market buzz around how certain tools integrate well with CRM and the extent of that integration my experience has been in some of the selections we've done is that these integrations are really nascent they're not that deep and so if the push is one of the major pushes for the marketing department is greater integration I would really want to understand what that integration looked like and make sure that the marketing team understood the extent of that integration as well thanks Kyle we had a question coming in from an audience member Katrina who asks are those capabilities referring to the workflow capabilities Joe mentioned available in all serums our org uses neon and has some of that functionality I would say just answer it cursorily and then throw it out to the team yes the this type of functionality the automated workflow is emerging increasingly in sophisticated ways across multiple crms neon yes but also the razor's edge Salesforce every action and a variety of others Kyle are you Kyle and Joe and Sarah are you seeing the same thing Joe you first yes so the vendor I was talking about was actually you know black boards with NXT but I know that they raises a chest you know sort of what they call workflows baked into razor's edge database view but this is more sort of acting upon the use of AI and sort of anticipating the behaviors of certain constituents and prompting actions upon that which is what I'm sort of excited about I'm not sure about other vendors at the moment I'm sure you know within you know nine months of like what rolling this out everybody else will sort of you know build something write a script and and you'll be able to use that functionality for me onto how do you have any I mean it's I've definitely seen it in other places and as you were talking about you know the particular client Joe was referencing I'm not involved there but when I started where my brain went was the process by which that organization made decisions about how that workflow who is going to support that workflow because I think the example you talked about earlier Joe was that somebody might do a personalized follow-up to donors who have given $500 or more and I'll bet for most of the folks on today's call and our client it's not as if somebody was just sitting around waiting for something to do so it means somebody's job is changing right like now I have the someone as a responsibility to follow up with those donors so I always think it's interesting the process by which organizations not only think about how they're gonna surface information and automated ways but what they're gonna do with that information once they get it thanks Kyle the next question is we actually have two or three different crms one for support services one for volunteers and the raisers edge for donors it's a mess and no one seems to care we routinely encounter organizations with multiple CRM s-sarah what would you say in response this question yeah so sometimes I build our approach is to kind of simply create a system map or a system diagram and what this does is really shows kind of where the system's connect and then lays bare where they don't connect and it also kind of documents the hard cost of having too many systems so it really is a critical first step in getting everyone together to really consider how each system is used and how the system's talk to each other or even how they don't talk to each other so kind of some other questions to think about when you're creating your map or this diagram are number one how do we get the right information out of each system and then move it to where it needs to be also think about how often is this done and then who's responsible so by using sort of separate platforms to manage different aspects of your donor information the data sources have no way to inform each other so the isolation if this data makes it difficult for you to get a full picture of your supporters which hurts your fundraising efforts you don't necessarily need up all the data from support services database to be replicated into the raisers edge or vice versa but maybe you sync back a tagged flag or attribute from the raisers edge into the support services database that indicates that that considering is a donor so that when that they call support services again the service rep can thank you and thank them for being a contributor so I would take the time just inventory the types of data that's in the different systems and have can inform the relationship make it easier to understand the customer when you're looking into each database individually I know that there's some great integration tools out there that can help with that data sink of course depending on what CRM you're using I think maybe there's Kyle what I might add is and I'm gonna go back to something I said earlier I talked about opportunities costs and I think often times when I work with clients people have a notional a notional idea that it would be better if we had one database or there was a database of record but increasingly as I get more gray hair I'm not always convinced that's the case so for the person who asked this question I would ask what the likelihood of somebody receiving support services would be to become a volunteer for example or to become a donor ideally and try to do some extrapolation of what the likelihood would be and then what the potential net revenue might look like and try to make an argument for the costs associated with getting integration either with a lowercase I or an uppercase I set up with volunteers at least the last time I read research on volunteers those those folks I believe are extremely likely to donate they're more likely to donate then obviously acquiring a new donor so if I were making an argument around that this is a worthwhile thing to do I'd want to figure out even before I integrate it how many volunteers right now do we have that aren't donors and based on industry standards if we converted let's say that there are 12 times as likely to give as an example what would that actually look like even if it was just a back of the napkin calculation because again I think rather than just glomming under the idea that everything should be in one place actually showing the monetary impact of eliminating some of these silos I think is a much more compelling way to make an argument to make a change and make an investment well thanks Kyle our next question is we are getting ready to do a wealth screening is there a vendor that you guys like oh so since most of the vendors use similar data sources for their wealth screening results I sort of would focus more on the steps and considerations that you should take before the screen itself so depending on the size of your screening you should at least make sure that you have one staff member to do the analysis when the results are returned and I would say don't screen if you don't have frontline fundraising staff to follow up on the leads that are produced btris strategic in the number of prospects that you screen and consider doing sort of rolling screenings because they're expensive and you don't want the results to just sit there gathering dust and then I guess as far as the actual data list to be screened cleaning the data beforehand is well worth the time investment because that data is the number one way Y matches aren't made so time spent on this in advance can save a lot of time which is money confirming that later on so I would actually suggest purchasing an address update through NCOA by the before all part of the screening because a significant match point for assets is the address I would also extend typos make sure that the addresses are consistently entered I've seen in some clients databases that the apartment number is before the street address and I would also not include anybody that only has a post office box address either search what their street addresses or just eliminate them from the screen file submitted and then you know try and gather as much information as possible so middle initial spouse's name maiden names are particularly important in matching individuals so make sure that you have all of that you know ready before you submit your file the other thing I would say is if budget is tight I wouldn't waste it on screening donors that you already know well so your board members your major donors maybe your you know he volunteers you already know them so I would eliminate those from the screening Wow I might I think the only things I would add to that Jo would be and you you touched on this is and I'm certainly not an expert on wealth screenings but I would say that make sure and I think this is what you were saying is that you have a plan to use the data from the screening and by plan I mean a real plan that might look like we we are going to reach out to X number of new or existing donors that we didn't know that they had the capacity that they did and we're gonna rank them the week after we get the data and we're gonna try to have the first contact within 30 days not just a plan of we're gonna find out more about our donors and it's gonna help us raise more money that's not a plan right secondly I'd say if is your first sounds like is the first wealth screening that organizations doing start cheap get a corolla not Alexis and I've seen this in organizations that do multiple screenings it's amazing how often some of the lowest cost screenings are the ones that move the needle for the organization and identify new donors and get them thinking in new ways and then lastly I would say whatever screening service you use make sure you have a plan for getting that data into your CRM if part of the story about donors is in some external spreadsheet or proprietary database and part of the story is in your seer that's a problem no major gift officer or executive directors going to want to have giving information in one place and engagement history in one place and the wealth screening live in an entirely different place so I think it's really important to pick a vendor where you know the data is portable enough and you have a plan at the expertise in-house to get that data in your CRM system great let's move on to the next question we just lost her database administrator what should we be looking for and hiring a new one we do have some resources on the site about this under the heading a good database manager is hard to find so there's a number of resources there that are available for anybody who wants to take a look at and it's a very detailed emphasis on what to look for and and also not just had a higher one but how to retain them as well since there's a lot of turnover but Kyle what would you say in response to this question I mean this is interesting because this is I started out as a database administrator many years ago and this has been a persistent problem in the industry as losing database administrators and the disruption that it causes for organizations and in the in that time I hope I've gotten a little bit wiser and sort of how I answer this question and what I tell people is most important has changed I actually think it's important but it's not essential that the person you're hiring knows how to make the software work and I say this because learning software while it's not easy learning the skill set to be a great database administrator is not easy and it takes years of experience and it took me more than five years to become what I would call a great database administrator it's a lot of the soft skills that make somebody a great database administrator and just to put this into concrete terms I think earlier one of the people asking a question they were on they were using neon and while I don't have any experience nyan as a technology platform given my experience in fundraising given my experience and development operations it's something I could pick up very very easily so I don't think it's important when hiring that you find somebody who is a seasoned technology expert I think it's more important to find somebody to use a seasoned database expert and in looking for that person just to go a little bit deeper I think of three roles that a great database administrator plays they are an entrepreneur which means that they are looking for opportunities in the data they're a great collaborator which means that they're capable of bringing people together as Joe suggested earlier to exploring new opportunities and they're also a great facilitator and what what I mean by that is they can facilitate introducing operational process data and technology changes to the organization and understand the speed with which an organization can make those changes and absorb those changes yeah if I could just pipe in I would just echo what Kyle says and that the most important element of a great database administrator is really not having all of the data solutions all the time but the ability to bring the right parties to the table and then kind of explore our creative solutions together so I think that where a lot of organizations often fall short is by being drawn in by that temptation to kind of bring someone in who can use their 10 or 15 plus years of specific software expertise to solve all of their problems immediately and while that would be fantastic it's really not very realistic so it's far more vital to the organization's long-term success to have someone that can spot opportunities on the horizon and then kind of bring everyone together to explore them and Joe would you have anything to add yeah so basically anyone can get training on the software solution itself but there are some you know soft skills that Kyle mentioned or core competencies that make a really excellent database manager I think they need to have be inquisitive they need to identify the information that is needed to clarify a situation so you know asking the right questions to draw out that information especially when others might be reluctant to talk about it they you know need to be a good communicator or interpreter of technical and functional requirements so a lot of the work in this position is to translate what the development development team needs to the finance team or IT to the analytics team and we all know that those team speak very different you know terminologies at times I also think that they should be a good problem solver think outside the box figure out creative solutions to specific problems that perhaps only exist in your organization a sort of you know innovation that can't just be Google search on you know the software solutions helpdesk knowledgebase so I would try to you know tease out those you know core competencies within the interviewer hiring process cool thanks Joe our next question is related very related and it is before our database administrators are left she left a huge list of things that needed to be cleaned up I have no idea where to start and had no idea that our database was so messy again this is one that we've encountered a number of times before particularly when we've come in to fill that gap when somebody when an organization lost an administrator suddenly and they wanted us to come in and sort of take charge of the situation and keep the trains running so Sarah how would you go about answering this question yeah so this is definitely something I've seen often and I would just offer before you can even begin to kind of clean up or prevent future bad data from coming through it's really important understand the overall data health through analyzation as in just how dirty is your database so some important questions to maybe ask yourself could be how bad is our duplicate situation where are these duplicates coming from and then kind of from there you can start to put together some audit queries to then begin the cleanup process yeah I mean I am I would encourage you to immediately try to figure out have other staff notice that the database was messy have they noticed for example that there might be five different ways the organization has missed her and the database does entering gifts does it take a secret secret decoder ring does pulling reports take a huge amount of time and if other people have noticed these types of things I would ask them to begin to catalogue not fix these areas for cleanup and I was just on vacation with a friend who was reading a book called an astronaut an astronaut's guide to life on Earth and this astronaut and I'm forgetting which astronaut it was but he was talking about how early in his career if he was if he saw a fire his immediate reaction would be to grab a fire extinguisher and start putting out the fire and what he said was that what NASA encourages folks to do which I think there's some wisdom in this is approach any urgent situation or a catastrophe to the extent that this database is a catastrophe in three stages first what they do is they warn so if there's a fire on the space station they let everyone know about the problem so this is an American astronaut and the first thing they do is they warn folks on the Russian side of the space station that something is a mess and then they go to gather where they try to gather as much information as possible and then they move on to fixing the problem and I think far too many organizations jump to fixing and we get calls often where people want us to their database in a short period of time and what I think you said earlier sarah was right like how did you get to that point and really understanding how you got to that point that's the first step that's the gather step before you move on yet you know what I like to do when I'm helping clients is to sort of set a schedule of queries sort of the order queries that you mentioned Sarah that help identify clean up opportunities needed sort of weekly monthly quarterly annually and all these depend on what your current organization's business practices are but will keep data cohesive and streamline so these queries can help identify where staff may need additional training if we repeatedly see miss coatings in entries so I think you know there's one thing to fix it up but as Sarah said you have to you know identify where that bad data is coming in from - Joe can you dive a little bit more deep into the weeds and give some examples of audit queries or let folks know where they can find some examples yeah so weekly order queries might be say for example any new record added that doesn't have any data in the address line fields I would run this and use that to update a checkbox on the record that indicates that the record has no valid addresses or if I know that leadership looks at an activity report every week I may have a query set up to help identify type or solicitor is missing from an interaction I can fix those before the report is run and then ensure like back yura see maybe on a monthly basis say the organization offers a free membership that's given for a year so each month I run an order query to remove that free membership code from those records when their time has expired or if records are missing a title to fix the addressee and salutation since some databases use the formula which relies on the presence of the title fields so perhaps a query can help you know identified those another one could be the record has a presence of an email address but there isn't you know that ampersand in the address I could go on there might be an annual report that you pull before you do your donor listing you know for you on your website so maybe well a query that indicates that you need to reach out to those individuals before that donor listing is published to ask them how they would prefer to be recognized or you know do an NCOA each year that would query on records that you know maybe have that has no valid address in the beginning so yeah there's a whole slew of audit queries and actually we could probably provide you know I document that lists out some of those examples Peter to the attendees afterwards if you like sure we can we can make that available and when we send out the follow-up email providing the links to the video and the recording will provide also some links of to resources that were that were mentioned during this webinar and we'll make that auto query list available at that time as well does build here's another question from the audience just build do this kind of clean up or help fix these issues once they have been gathered and identified or can we use the help desk at our specific CRM I think the answer it is to some extent yes you can use the help desk at your specific CRM it varies dramatically by the competency of the help desk for that CRM and what level of support that you have and how much they're really willing to work with you on solving problems that are sort of business-related as opposed to how to related and yes build can help do these kinds of cleanups Kyle I think I would say that that we're reluctant to get into situations where there's a quick fix that's asked for as you alluded to earlier we want to work with clients to understand that the the the long-term value and what's being proposed would you do and answer that differently no I think that's right I mean I think that you know I have a client right now where the pace of change is really slow for many people at the organization they want things fixed right away but it's really important to understand I think as it was Sarah said that understanding how they got to that point is and understanding the decisions that were made is critical before you just jump into cleaning things up and I have learned that the hard way by removing something that I thought was extraneous combining things that I thought could be combined you know it's just hard to jump in to those types of cleanup changes really quickly and it's always important I think to assess how you got there Thanks we've got about eight minutes left to answer the remaining two questions so we're gonna have to move a little bit more quickly and then we have a couple of housekeeping notes and more information to share at the very end in the last couple minutes so moving along our next question is I'm never able to get the reports so that I need for my fundraising team is that how our database is structured or am I asking the wrong questions Sarah how would you answer that yeah so I would say it's not so much an issue of asking the wrong questions as it is kind of taking the time to explain how you intend to use the data that you're requesting so a lot of people get tripped up by the database language which is where having a report request form can really come in handy and just to clarify when I say database language I I mean opportunity versus a proposal or maybe an action versus an activity they're called different names in different databases but they really mean the same thing and the language in the database isn't always in line with how your specific organization might categorize what you'd like the report to show Joe do you have anything to add are yeah I completely agree I think sometimes we just don't know how to ask for what we want and we all know how differently fundraisers and IT tech Minds look so most of the time it's just a translation issue so having a report request form is a great way for prompting the requester to think about what it is they expect to see in the end you know is it a list of gifts versus donors are there any exclusions if it's for a mailing should we include international addresses is it for internal or external use that will tell the database manager to trigger the use of the anonymous flag you know is a report for Finance so we should exclude soft credits that may lead to double counting all these questions you know might sound like an interrogation but it really helps the database manager anticipate also the fields you might need in the end that you haven't specifically asked for I love the idea of a report request form and I think the biggest question is figuring out that the boundaries of the report request form I see some organizations great ones that are eight pages long with no expectation that they're gonna have to talk to the person who made the request and so I always encourage organizations that I work with to set up time to meet to talk about the report requests after they get the form I literally don't see enough nonprofits getting in a conference room doing a screen screen share and building out a report or a query or a list live and I think that that can be an effective used in combination with a report request perform a report request for that is I like the idea of report request reform yes really about cool thanks guys and then a final question here unless somebody wants to try to squeak in one through the chat at the last minute sometimes I just want to start from scratch with like database we can't do that but where do we start I would say a we feel your pain I think everybody has the temptation that it would be just easier to build from scratch then then fix what they've got but Gaia what would you present as being a more practical solution well yeah clearly clearly you can't do that and I know that person who answered the question asked the question wasn't thinking that was a viable solution I'll just go back to something I said earlier it's really important to diagnose how did you get to this point and understand that because there might be some changes that you need to make and staffing how you the operations run business processes and this is again as a plug for just not jumping in and starting cleaning up but when you're at that point that you're ready to do cleanup I would say that there's two things I might recommend one is making sure that VIP records are absolutely perfect and I think that that's a well-known tactic of probably a lot of the folks on today's call secondly I would say that where I start is when I work on cleanup is understanding the processes that support the daily operations of the organization so really digging deep understanding how gifts are handled how they're entered how they're reconciled how acknowledgments are done and how we're seating is done that's where I start because you're not going to win any friends if you tackle a database project and you're focusing on major gift fields like tracking where proposals are if gift entry is a total mess so you've got to get that part of your house in order first yeah so I think you may be feeling this way I'm speculating but I'm as you mean that the data in this is is you know incomplete and consistent and accurate outdated but if that's the case the good news is that all of these can be corrected and prevented so one of the things that I do when I first am engaging with the new client is do a full assessment or audit of their database so so often I can see where data has been entered in the system a certain way for a few years and then complete other way for the following view and nothing was entered for a few months and then we're back to the original way this tends to happen you know when there's staff turnover or when an inexperienced but well-intentioned person comes in and starts their own tracking procedures but fails to take the previous year's data and conform it to their new structure so investing time and effort into cleaning and aligning your data is critical for the effective use of your CRM and it's value increases obviously exponentially when data is of high quality it's more effective at driving greater organizational success because of the reliance on you know the fact data based decisions instead of just human intuition and habit but I think if it's a case of bad data you can clean it up so that there is help don't give up don't start from scratch Sarah yeah so I'll just kind of wrap up to say one of the ways that build helps to manage kind of this sense of overwhelming and frustration feeling is kind of wanting to start through what we call data governance so with some of our clients we have a monthly meeting and that focuses on the management and integrity of data it's called the data governance committee and then within this committee there are what we call data stewards and I know Joe touched on this earlier but just to dig a little bit deeper data stewards represent each team and spend time identifying issues and defining procedures and then kind of formulating a plan to execute new procedures data etc so then when staff take on the role of being a data steward they're assuming accountability for some part of that data and have an active stake in its quality which is really key so data governance relies heavily on data stewards to implement policies within the organization and then ultimately the end goal is then better data quality so having this committee with a clear purpose really ensures that the data is consistent and trustworthy and I think overall it really optimizes operations as a whole cool thanks I'll just add quickly that we're gonna be presenting several webinars over the course of the rest of this year and you'll be getting emails about them all you who are on the call today on data quality what is data quality how to how to measure it and how to apply it data quality principles in the information management basics as a separate topic from that in a variety of other things so keep your eyes peeled for those just a couple of quick concluding notes before we sign off for more information you can visit our blog or learning resources section of our site or subscribe for our newsletter if you haven't already done so increasingly now and this will be the case with this webinar as well we share a lot of detailed information in these webinars and it's nice to be able to go back to specific sections when we post the video on the build consulting website each question will be time stamped in the description for those who want to be able to consume it as an mp3 file that'll be available as well so you can listen to it like you would a podcast and within a within a reasonable period of time we hope to also have a transcription up so it'll be available on all of those different formats and you can continue the conversation with us via any of these methods that you like and feel free to reach out to us any time with your questions and comments and let us know how we can better serve you and finally just a couple of quick housekeeping notes about immediately upcoming events community IT is producing a webinar in March on the 20th from 3 to 4 p.m. Eastern time it's going to be a walkthrough of the first nonprofit cybersecurity incident report which takes a look at the different types and occurrences of attacks that happen at small and mid-sized nonprofit organizations and the security improvements that will provide protection against the most common attacks and build consulting is going to be doing webinar as well on a topic TBD and you'll get an email about that so thanks for everyone who joined the call today it's been really great to spend time with you and we hope we answered some of your questions again feel free to reach out to us if you have further questions and we started out with 31 attendees and we maintain two that it no more of a loss than three individuals up until just a minute ago so that's great retention thanks for sticking with us throughout as we answered your questions and thanks Kyle for participating of course thanks Joe hi everybody thanks for joining thanks Sarah bye thank you have a great day everyone take care bye