A member of the PRSPCT-L listserve (for prospect researchers) asked “What do other institutions do to regulate or “police” data entry work, specifically when you have multiple users with authority to make updates?”
It’s a tough problem. Here are a few approaches (other than locking down data entry):
- Policies. You need clear data entry standards.
- Security. You need to control who can make changes and what they can change.
- Training. No one gets access to change data without training on your policies. Training should be targeted to role. You don’t need a week of training to enter a contact report.
- Monitoring. Someone (or multiple someones) needs to review new and changed entries.
- Retraining. When people make mistakes, bring it to their attention. Some organizations make that person fix the mistake. If they continue to make mistakes, you need to retrain them and be prepared to take away their data entry access.
- Automation. You should at least run reports on a regular to look for errors. You may be able to automate some fixes. You might also use vendors to perform cleanups like merge/purges on duplicates.
- Acceptance. Some things have to be fixed by your office or by Development Services. No one is going to fire an effective fundraiser because she’s bad at data entry (although they might get her an assistant who will handle the entry). Donors will give online and misspell their own names, or leave the caps lock on.
Decentralized data entry is efficient and is the only practical approach at some organizations. But the more people you have entering data the more problems you’ll have with quality control. If no one’s in charge of quality control you’re going to have a database full of garbage. For more on this, see my posts:
Robert says
Melissa Graves, the Annual Fund and Development Services Manager at Pathfinder International, suggests the following regarding data integrity checks:
On a Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Annual basis what are the routine audits you perform?
• You may check the gifts entered daily – at least with a cursory screening.
• You may check every day that constituents entered are not missing primary addressee or primary salutations.
• You may check every week that gifts given recently are all marked as acknowledged or receipted.
• You may check every week that gifts are not in the wrong appeal, fund or campaign (based on any rules you have which you cannot use defaults or limits from preventing)
• You may check every month that all constituents with missing information in their primary address (no add lines, no city, no state, no zip) are checked to see if they can be fixed or if they need to be marked Has No Valid Address.
• You may check every month that all records with a Mr. title have a Male gender. (and Female for Mrs. Ms. Miss)
• You may run an AddressFinder (NCOA) every quarter.
Set up a schedule and actually dedicate staff time to do these (NOT to be skipped for something deemed more “important” like fundraising!)
I start with some of the more common errors but my audit list is ever growing. If I ever have to do a cleanup of something, once I have all the records cleaned I add to my audit a regular check to see that more of that same error is not being added back into the database. (Unless I can use security, defaults or required fields to make sure that it physically cannot happen again).
If you can automate any of these, do it. If you can automate the fix with any kind of global change, great. If it is a manual check and manual changes – share the load. I expect my gift processor to run many weekly audits and I only perform that audit once a month (to audit that the audits are happening).
I rarely fix any data unless it requires a global change. Once a month all I do is record the number of records in any audit. Then I delegate it to the responsible person to make the changes, which is most often the person who made the mistake. Over time I have a spreadsheet of my monthly audits showing where we continue to have issues and I can identify training opportunities either for groups or individuals.