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The Perfect Data Recipe

nonprofit data

When you're making a cake there are ingredients that are an absolute must, others you add to taste, and some are just fun to include. Your nonprofit organization's data is similar.

Let's think about managing our data like making a cake and you, as a person who manages or works with the data, are the cake maker.

What are the steps to making a cake?

  1. Mixing
    As you combine the ingredients as per the recipe, you see the cake batter come together. The mixing of the ingredients and the order in which you mix them is absolutely critical to successfully making a cake. Similarly, how well your data works for your organization is largely dependent on the mix of data types and how they combine to create a full picture of your donors. 
  2. Customizing
    Many cake makers adjust the recipe to taste by adding a bit of almond extract or a dash of cinnamon. Whatever that little extra is, they are making the recipe their own. Customizing the recipe in this way is not entirely necessary to making a tasty cake, but it sure does make it feel like your own custom creation. As you add custom data scores or modeling to your donor data, you are creating a more custom picture of your donors which can make your data better serve your fundraising needs, but it is not necessarily mission critical.
  3. Baking
    Next is the actual baking - the preheating, the pan, the greasing of the pan or not. These steps are not the most exciting, but they are absolutely necessary to making a cake that will stick together and not to the pan. The baking part of the cake making process is like the daily data management tasks you perform to make sure the data holds together and comes out of "the oven" as you expected.
  4. Decorating
    Many cake makers find decorating to be the most enjoyable part of the process. This is where we can create something unique and extra special. Although it's fun and tasty, how we decorate a cake is not absolutely necessary to a successful confection. Our data is the same way. There are extras like donor pictures, birthdays, and anniversaries that add additional sweetness but are not all together critical to a successful fundraising initiative. 

When we think about working with our organization's data like following the recipe for making a cake it can better highlight the data we absolutely need, data that is nice to have that adds a bit of flavor, and the icing on the proverbial cake that makes everything a bit sweeter.

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