Dashboards for All: Democratizing Data Across Large Organizations
Description
Most nonprofits seek to create a 360-degree view of their donors, which requires buy-in and participation from staff in disparate settings as well as staff located at “headquarters.” Unfortunately, access to analytics and insights often exists only among fundraising staff and in the C-suite.
Field staff and volunteers also need meaningful analytics, but frequently neither dashboards nor the data to support them exist. Without complete data, there’s no value in creating new analytics and dashboards. And without the promise of meaningful analytics, remote staff have little incentive to enter donor, volunteer, committee and other data in the CRM.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Trust for Public Land undertook major efforts to extend meaningful analytics to different departments and locations. From dashboards that track fundraising performance against goals to dashboards that overlay wealth-screening data on high-engagement donors, these organizations are realizing tangible results by delivering relevant data-driven insights throughout their ecosystems.
Learning Outcomes
- Understand how large nonprofits developed dashboards and drill-down analytics to meet the needs of internal customers
- Develop and implement a targeted needs assessment to identify organization-wide data deficits and opportunities to centralize data.
- Understand models for implementing organization-wide change around data collection that motivates and rewards staff and volunteers.