Data Transparency: Are You a Frog in Hot Water?

I’ve written close to 100 blog posts and I have never actually taken someone else’s blog and copied it word for word—but this article from Lisa Scott at Barker & Scott is so perfect and spot-on I just want to share it verbatim. You all know from my other blogs how important I believe data is to our success in the nonprofit industry. But, it is not enough to just say “data"—it’s about data strategies, business rules, organizational priorities and much more when you think through your data.

Here’s what Lisa thinks—and I could not agree more. From Lisa Scott, executive at Barker & Scott:

There’s an old anecdote about frogs placed in gradually heated water not recognizing danger until it is too late. It’s often used as a metaphor for people ignoring, say, the growing rumblings of a nearby volcano, steadily melting Arctic ice or, in this case, changing consumer experiences and expectations when it comes to their brand relationships.

The Frog
Let's be blunt: Like the rest of us, nonprofit leaders have come to expect highly personalized, concierge-style treatment from their favorite commercial brands. Yet when it comes to their own policies and procedures, their constituents and supporters shouldn't expect that same level of treatment. That’s bad news for an industry that wants to attract, retain and often monetize a public grown accustomed to customer-friendly practices.

The Water
Consider the experience you or I have come to expect from most commercial brands. We may be influenced by a friend’s comment on social media, investigate the recommended brand’s website, sign up for a newsletter, receive a special offer, download that offer on our mobile phone, then redeem it at a retail location.
 
Yet despite the complexity of that multichannel journey, we expect to be recognized at every step of that engagement. A failure to do so could lead to alienation or loss of the customer in a marketplace where such expectations are now commonplace.
 
And where does all of this behind-the-scenes magic take place? With data sharing. Silos are torn down, internal goals, measurements and personnel policies redefined, and individual customer channels and touchpoints made subordinate to the overall customer experience.

The Heat

Contrast this experience—the one you and I experience countless times a year—with the way the nonprofit industry still treats its supporters.
 
Data is hoarded and safeguarded even within the same walls, and especially across chapters and affiliates. Organizational metrics and operating silos remain stubbornly resistant to change, meaning one hand of the organization rarely knows what the other is doing. And in the case of large nonprofits, we’re talking about a lot of hands.
 
So why, when the rest of the corporate world recognizes the imperative for data sharing and transparency, is the nonprofit world falling farther behind?
 
In a word, fear. Fear borne out of outdated policies and philosophies that still regard supporter data as the province of whoever collects it first. Meaning that data and channels are deemed more important than the supporter's experience!