An Ode to Our Data Kidneys 

There are some body metaphors we fight over. If you don’t want to be the heart of the organization, you probably want to be the brain or the muscles.  

This is an ode to our data kidneys – those that filter the waste out of our data and return clean results. This data hygiene is an essential function, without which our fundraising could not survive. 

Part of that is in the constituent experience. In 2020, Rhode Island mailed out their tax refund checks signed by, instead of their state treasurer and controller, Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse. Turns out, someone used the test print files instead of the real print files. Someone clearly created the test file and thought, “What would be the most obvious tip-off that it’s a test?”, assuming that Mickey Mouse would be a dead giveaway to someone somewhere along the line that this check was not the real McCoy. And yet it passed. 

This is the humorous version. What can happen is when a man received a letter from OfficeMax addressed to his name, with the second line of the address reading “Daughter Killed In Car Crash.” A year earlier, his daughter had, in fact, been killed in a car crash. 

It is unlikely this man bought office supplies from this letter. 

It’s more likely that he wanted to find the person responsible. But there probably was no person responsible. A screw-up that significant requires a faulty system to let that letter go through. And every snowflake in that avalanche pleads not guilty. 

This is only part of why we need our data kidneys – the part that ends in irate consumers and CNN stories. More mundanely, when the waste isn’t filtered out of our data, that waste comes out in our spend. It’s a continual extra cost in your marketing efforts and shows donors and potential donors that you don’t know them or why they would give.  

This is better than sending out your mail pieces from Mickey Mouse but only slightly. It’s taking third-party data as holy writ and labeling people with the wrong religion. It’s navigating the challenging world of digital identity with different identifiers, email addresses, and ways of interacting with content (desktop, mobile, apps, gaming devices, smart TVs, and more). It’s knowing you don’t know what you think you know. You know? 

Good data hygiene can fix a great deal of this, shutting the leaks out of your marketing investment from gushing hole to trickle. 

A big part of this is strong identity resolution. Many digital-focused CDPs will use identity resolution based primarily on website tags, IP addresses, and online triggered events. These systems can be very good at event-based, digital-focused efforts like triggering a marketing email or texting. 

But your donors deserve an omnichannel experience and that requires an omnichannel identity graph that marries online devices and offline activities to get one rich view of a person.  

So let others claim the popular organs. When you clean the data, you clean the whole body and make it function better. And that’s something to be proud of.