6 steps to nailing your supporter experience with data excellence

As organisations focus more on data-driven approaches, it’s important to ensure everyone understands and appreciates the value of data excellence. By ensuring data excellence, charities receive a whole host of benefits, from improving staff morale and reducing ineffective time usage, to growing their supporter base and donations. Here we'll be focusing on the benefits for supporter experiences.

Before we get started, you might be asking what's meant by 'data excellence'?

Data excellence refers to the impact of data management on the data itself, first and foremost with regard to data quality (defined as “fitness for purpose”), but also with regard to additional data-related aspects, such as data compliance, data security and privacy, or data risk.

Here are some tips to help you nail your supporter experience with data excellence.

Start with a clear understanding of your goals and objectives

You’ll need to start by defining the outcomes you want to achieve through data excellence and set specific goals and objectives. By defining these goals, you’ll have a better understanding of what’s required from a data management perspective and will be able to prioritise efforts accordingly.

Get the right data

It's essential to have the correct data to make informed decisions. This includes data on your supporters, their behaviour, and feedback. Ensure that your data collection processes are efficient, accurate, and up-to-date. You can use various tools, such as surveys, web analytics, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, to collect and store your data. From our research, we heard the average charity uses 30 platforms, so this can be a huge job to keep on top of. Don’t shy away from new platforms just because of the data admin, CharityBI can help you collate and de-duplicate data.

Maintain data hygiene

Data hygiene is the practice of keeping your data clean and accurate. This includes de-duplicating your data, unifying it from different sources, and removing any inaccuracies. Maintaining data hygiene helps you avoid errors and ensures your data is trustworthy. From speaking with fundraisers, we heard a lack of trust in data is a big problem preventing them from fully utilising and embracing data in their role. Having confidence in your data hygiene processes is essential for delivering an excellent supporter experience and prevents issues like using the wrong contact details or not abiding by marketing consents correctly. With CharityBI you can see the most recent consent status for each different platform a donor has engaged with.

Use data insights to deliver personalised experiences

Data can provide valuable insights into your supporters' behaviour, preferences, and motivations. Use these insights to create a personalised experience for each of your supporters. For example, you can use data to segment your supporters based on their behaviour and send targeted updates and opportunities that are relevant to their interests. By having a holistic view of your supporters through combining data sources, you can create more personalised experiences. In CharityBI, you'll be able to view all of the different platforms a donor has engaged with your charity, combing both marketing and financial data.

Make data-driven decisions

Data-driven decision-making helps you make informed decisions based on facts and evidence. One of the biggest barriers to doing this can actually be internal culture. Having everyone on board with the value of data and data excellence is crucial to being able to make data-driven decisions, which can help you identify areas for improvement and make changes that have a positive impact on your supporters' experience. In the long run, it can even help with donation forecasting.

Continuously monitor and improve

Data excellence isn’t a destination. It’s a journey that you’ll need to keep going on by regularly monitoring your data and data management processes. Use the data to identify areas for improvement and make changes that enhance the supporter experience. This includes regularly checking your data for inaccuracies and maintaining sound data hygiene practices.

In conclusion, data excellence is essential for a charity to provide a great supporter experience and build long-lasting relationships. With confidence in your data, you can go from fulfilling basic needs to delighting and surprising donors with a personalised experience. Start by setting clear goals, collecting the right data, maintaining data hygiene, using data insights to understand your supporters, making data-driven decisions, and continuously monitoring and improving.