Wes’s Wednesday Wisdom

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