Nonprofit organisations are investing heavily in digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve efficiency, automate processes, and gain valuable business insights. However, even the most advanced technologies cannot overcome the fundamental challenge: poor-quality data or inefficient legacy data. The familiar saying, “garbage in, garbage out,” remains as relevant today as ever. If the data feeding your systems is inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent, the outputs and decisions generated by AI will be equally unreliable.
Before attempting to cleanse or correct data, nonprofit organizations should first assess—or “interrogate”—their data to understand its current quality and identify the root causes of any issues. A structured data quality assessment helps determine where improvements are needed and prevents costly mistakes later in the transformation journey. It can also help you determine which data might not be worth transferring / keeping or legally does need to be properly archived.
Several key dimensions should be evaluated during a data quality assessment.
- Accuracy ensures that data correctly reflects real-world values and events.
- Timeliness examines whether the information is current enough to support operational and strategic decisions. Outdated data can produce misleading insights, especially with fast-changing technology toolkits.
- Consistency verifies that data is represented uniformly across different systems and departments. For example, a donor or member’s information should not vary between the donation or membership CRM (relationship management) systems, finance, and communication support systems.
- Completeness checks whether all required data fields are populated, while uniqueness identifies duplicate records that can distort reporting and analytics.
Organizations should also assess availability, ensuring that the right people and systems can access the data when required, while balancing this with appropriate security controls to protect sensitive information and maintain regulatory compliance.
Another important consideration is whether the data is suitable for analytics. Data may technically exist but still be poorly structured, missing key attributes, or stored in formats that limit meaningful analysis. Understanding how the data will support future reporting, machine learning, and AI tools and applications is essential.
Historical data also deserves careful scrutiny. Over time, business definitions, processes, and coding standards often evolve. For example, the definition of an “active member / stakeholder / donor / volunteer” may have changed, or donation categories may have been reclassified. If these historical differences are not understood, they can introduce bias, create misunderstandings, and produce misleading analytical results. AI models trained on such data may inadvertently reinforce outdated business practices or historical inequalities.
Ultimately, data quality is not simply a technical concern—it is a business capability. By thoroughly interrogating data before cleansing or migration, organizations can identify weaknesses, establish trusted data foundations, and significantly improve the success of digital transformation and AI initiatives. Investing time in understanding your data today leads to more reliable insights, better decision-making, and greater confidence in the technologies that depend upon it. So ensure teams connect across your organization before switching systems or adding in a new technology tool – even if it is just “testing” some new options.
Some Easy Summer Tasks
Doing a summer data cleanup is also one of the most strategic moves a nonprofit can make to prepare for a successful fall and year-end fundraising season. By tackling database maintenance during these slower summer months, your organization can increase outreach efficiency, prevent wasted costs, and maximize end-of-year revenue. You don’t need a massive, once-a-decade initiative to improve. Focus on manageable summer tasks like removing duplicates / merging donor records to prevent annoyed donors receiving multiple emails or running an NCOA update to catch snail mail address changes. These small annual maintenance tasks can make a huge improvement to your next campaign effort.
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