I get asked this a lot.
“I know what you’ve told me you do, but what do you actually do all day?”
Honestly, I wonder that myself sometimes. I get up, wander into the office and suddenly it’s 6pm and the dogs are acting like they’ve never been fed and are planning a food-based revolution.
So… what have I actually done? Here are a few snippets from the last few weeks:
- Built a digital acquisition campaign – automations, forms, email journeys
- Created an API feed between a booking platform and a fundraising CRM
- Designed an import template for lottery data
- Mapped supporter lifetime value against diocese data
- Run complex selections across CRM and Access
- Coached a client from novice user to managing a funding pipeline
- Rewritten a mapping document that spans three platforms
- Explained how BACS Direct Debits actually work
- Carried out housekeeping and suppression processing
- Answered a million and one random questions
Looking back at that list, it’s a bit of a mix. But I suspect it’s not that unusual. In fundraising, you often end up doing what needs to be done – and learning along the way. Over time, that builds up into something slightly hard to define.
Take Direct Debits. Without understanding how BACS works, it’s difficult to interpret cancellations, timings and data flows. That’s how you end up staring at payment files and figuring things out step by step. Most of us are a long way beyond our job descriptions.
We’re a mix of things we’ve learnt, picked up, and occasionally had to figure out quickly. Some of it is obvious. Some of it is oddly specific. If you compared what we actually do to what our job descriptions say, there would be overlap – but also a lot that sits outside it. And maybe that’s the point.
That mix of work is often hard to cover in a small team – it’s too varied to sit neatly in one role, but still needs doing. Over the coming months I’ve got space to support teams who have that kind of day-to-day data work.
And if you know a team that’s a bit stuck with their data – whether that’s processes, their CRM, or just getting things to work as they should – I’d really appreciate an introduction.
#DataQuality
#CRM
#CharitySector
#DataGovernance
#Nonprofits
