Collecting, storing and managing information in a responsible and respectful way underpins digital maturity.

Data helps organisations understand their supporters, beneficiaries, clients, donors and advocacy targets. Data helps them make evidence-based business and social impact decisions, in the short, medium and long term. Data helps drive an organisation’s impact.

Organisations need to know how their audiences interact with them. They need to know which channels people use, for what, and how often. Armed with this intelligence, organisations can design appropriate journeys. Good user journeys satisfy people’s needs and wants and encourage long-term engagement. All in the service of an organisation achieving its vision.

Performance data is essential for learning, iterating and improving. It can show how well the organisation is delivering its research, programmes or services and reaching the right people. 

To provide useful insights, data needs to be clean. It must also be collected and stored in a secure and compliant way.

Organisations need technology, processes and skills that bring together data from many sources. They also need to create digestible reports that tell a story of the organisation’s journey, a project, campaign or an audience journey. Armed with these insights they can plan the next campaign or the next product or the next five year strategy. ​

Things to think about

• How easy is it for you to create insights about your audience’s behaviours, based on multiple sources of data (eg email, donations and actions data)?
• Does your organisation have reliable sources of data about the context of its work?
• Are new projects based on this data evidence?
• Does data reporting (beyond fundraising) feature in your team’s or organisation’s decision-making?