The Smart Nonprofit

CHAPTER 5Data, Data, Data

INTRODUCTION

Data is the lifeblood of smart technology. Data is being generated, stored, organized, analyzed, summarized, and used to make predictions in bigger and faster ways than ever. Every organization that has a digital presence of some kind, and that is almost every organization, is generating large amounts of data. However, generating data and using it well are not the same thing.

Organizations may have a lot of data, but it is unlikely to be clean or prepped for action (even for use by an outside vendor). Or an organization may not have a plan for analyzing it. This is how you become a DRIP (Data-Rich, Information-Poor).^1,2 According to France Q. Hoang of boodle.AI, “The biggest challenge in implementing AI is getting good data. Nonprofits can use their donor and prospect lists; however, the problem with this data is that it is often messy, contains duplicates, or information is too skinny [not enough variables].” Hoang says that these flaws make it difficult to train an algorithm to be accurate.

Smart tech systems need high-quality data sets that are complete, clean (meaning the entries are correct and complete), and very, very big.

This chapter begins with an overview of how much data is being generated digitally right now, provides an introduction to data science and scientists, and outlines how your organization needs to prepare its own data and work with outside data providers. We end with some ways we hope you will explore pooling your ...