We've all heard the phrase "Perfect is the enemy of good" and I like to think that most of us believe it. But oddly enough, this phrase tends to get ignored when it comes to data management.

In my experience, too often associations believe that if they discover anyerrors in their data they think all of their data is bad. There's a tendency to extrapolate minor (and expected) errors to larger problems.

Some examples I often see:

• Emails bounce and not all of our emails are being opened.
• We have duplicate records.
• Demographic data that we collected years ago is out of date.
• We upload data from an outside registration system and not all of the data matches or uploads properly.

Too often associations will take these examples and say "See, our data is garbage!"

Now, for some associations, this may be true! But in the vast majority of cases, there is an assumption that any errors means everything is wrong. And this just isn't true.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to keep our data clean. I'm just suggesting that we need to give ourselves a little grace and stop expecting perfection.