Wes's Weekly Wisdom Archives

Opting out and communication preferences Last week’s newsletter discussed the need for associations to collect mobile phone numbers for use in communications. Several readers noted that I didn’t address opt-outs. Opting out should be implicit in all our data management, but I’ll address it explicitly here. As a rule, we need to provide our members, customers, […]

Are you collecting mobile phone numbers? You should be. Are you collecting (and using) the mobile phone numbers of your members? If you aren’t, it might be time to consider doing it. Here’s the thing about mobile phone numbers: For a certain demographic (e.g., ME), the mobile number is sacred. Only the most important people […]

Spend less time on data management and more on higher value activities Data management is very often tedious work. It’s important, but it’s tedious, and can also be time-consuming. And any time staff spends on managing data is time they are not spending on higher value activities like interacting directly with members, creating new programs and […]

Change anything you want, except your name! This is an oldy but a goody, but since it came up with a client recently, I’ll share it again. As a rule, you should allow your members and customers to update any of their primary contact information (e.g., address, phone, etc.) online, EXCEPT for their name. Why? […]

If you don’t trust your vendor… When I start an AMS selection project with a client, one of the first questions I ask is: “Would you be willing to stay with your current provider if they can do what you need them to do?” In most cases, the client says “no,” because they’ve already decided […]

Your RFP should go to no more than five vendors! As a rule, when I send an RFP to vendors on behalf of my clients (for a new AMS, LMS, or other software product), the RFP goes out to no more than five vendors. Why only five and not 10, or 20? There are several reasons, […]

Be concise! I started a monthly newsletter almost 25 years ago (which I recently discontinued). And almost six years ago I started writing these “Wednesday Wisdom” missives. I’ve received more compliments about my Wednesday Wisdom in six years than I have for my monthly newsletter in nearly 25 years ago. Why? Because these missives are […]

A great example of a data integrity report! A couple months back I discussed the importance of data integrity reports. One of my past clients and a longtime reader, David Churchill at Grantmakers in Health, offered up this idea, which I think is fantastic and should be added to any association’s list of data integrity reports. […]

“If you keep doin’ what you’re doin’, you’ll keep gettin’ what you’re gettin’.” I saw this line recently (“If you keep doin’ what you’re doin’, you’ll keep gettin’ what you’re gettin’.”) and I chuckled because of how often I experience this with my clients. I’ll hear things from my clients like “Our data is really […]

Rather than adding something new, try subtracting I read recently that sociological research suggests, when presented with a problem, humans default to “adding” something to address the problem, rather than subtracting. And of course, this got me to thinking about how this happens in data management all the time. Some examples: When faced with a particular challenge for collecting […]

It’s always people, process, and technology I speak and write a lot about people, process, and technology (Here’s a whole bunch on that.) In a nutshell, your highest performance will come when the right people are using the right technology in the right way (process). So whenever there is a data management challenge, we need to […]

Once it’s lost, trust can be difficult to regain I recall hearing once long ago that trust is like a bank account with one distinct difference. If you think of telling the truth as one unit of savings, a lie counts as four units of spending. Put another way, every time you “lie” you have to […]

Share your successes! I was speaking at an association meeting recently and one of the points I raised was that associations should practice what I call database PR or database public relations. In a nutshell, database PR is about proactively and regularly telling our users all the good work that is occurring in the database. (Here’s more on database PR.) We need […]

What are YOUR data integrity reports? Sitting in an AMS demo with a client recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see the AMS vendor had a short list of reports they called “Data cleaning” reports. These reports included a check for potential duplicate records, checking for erroneous emails, and checking for other missing data (e.g., […]

You might have to do SOME of the work yourself! Many, many years ago I met with an executive director of a small association to discuss their needs for a new association management system. In the course of the conversation we determined that one thing she’d like to be able to do is capture key points […]

Don’t manage to the exception! One of the universal truths about data management is, wherever possible, avoid managing to the exception. What I mean by this is to avoid developing any process that is designed to catch some arcane or unusual circumstance. Instead, the process should capture what happens the vast majority of the time, and […]

It’s always about improvement Talking with a client recently, she expressed frustration about one particular project around data. As she put it, “It feels like no matter what we do, we’re never able to get all the data we want from our members.” My response? “You’re right. You never will. And that’s OK.” Because the reality […]

Don’t be a hoarder! The simple truth is that it’s almost “free” to collect data. Or at least that’s how it seems. Set up a field in the database, send out an email and ask for the data, and voila, you’re collecting new data. The problem is that, in many (most?) cases, the data that we […]

With data analytics (as with most things), keep it simple! Over the past several years I’ve spoken with many clients and other associations about their experience with data analytics. I have been surprised to learn that many associations have implemented fairly expensive analytics tools but have not had great success with them. So I was pleasantly surprised to […]

Don’t forget about periodic maintenance Just as most automobiles need periodic maintenance, keeping your data as up to date as possible requires maintenance, as well. And while most cars have a “typical” maintenance schedule, they are not all exactly the same (all-electric cars, for example, don’t need oil changes!). The same is true for the data […]