Wes’s Wednesday Wisdom

Don’t forget about what got better Negativity bias is the tendency to focus on only those things that aren’t working, rather than focusing on what has improved. I’ve observed that during a switch from one AMS to another, frequently staff will fall into this trap. The result can be as simple as spending too much time on […]

Give a little at a time rather than taking away I’m sure there’s research somewhere that explains this phenomenon*, but in my experience, most people are more bothered when you take something away from them than they are when you give them very little to start with and add as needed. Here’s what I’ve seen:

First, you gotta have the data When I work with clients on a new AMS selection and we’re discussing what they want to be able to do with a new system, it’s very common to hear something like: “We want to be able to report on a range of demographics about our members.” Early on

Work on your relationship with your AMS vendor It is no coincidence that my most successful clients are those that have a very strong relationship with their AMS vendor. I’ve written in the past about how buying an AMS is more like getting married than buying, for example, a new car. It’s possible (even likely!)

Dashboards for Data Integrity I’ve written a bunch on data integrity reports. (Click here for some examples.) The purpose of a data integrity report is to find potentially erroneous data in your system, so you can clean it up. I’ve also written a lot about dashboards. (Click here for some examples.) Dashboards are simply reports

Next-to-Nothing Goals I saw a Ted Talk by Christine Carter recently discussing the concept of “next-to-nothing” goals. The idea is to learn a new habit by setting ridiculously small goals that will move you to the larger goal. It could be something as simple as walking for just one minute as a goal toward becoming

Just because you can… In response to a recent Wednesday Wisdom on averages hiding the extremes, a past client of mine said: “This reminds of the old saying: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” And he’s absolutely right! There are many examples of this in data management. Here are just a couple: +

Always ask “Why?” Little kids ask “Why?” all the time, because they are sponges for learning. They don’t know what they don’t know, and so they ask “Why?” to get a better understanding. As we get older, we tend to lose this natural curiosity, either because we assume “Why?” has already been asked and answered

Averages hide the extremes I can’t remember where I first heard it, but “averages hide the extremes” can be a really useful guide when thinking about how you manage data. Here’s a nice illustration from one of my clients: As they looked at their event registration they saw an average of 100 registrations per month

Look up PARTIAL names! Train your staff to do look ups on partial names, not full names. If you’re looking up an individual’s name, you should only have to type in part of the last name to find the record. The same goes for company names (i.e., organization records). Partial is better than full, because full increases the