Heart, Soul & Data

What can you learn from a ghost writer about data? Well, when it comes to how to effectively leverage data in copy and content, quite a lot!

Treasa Edmond of Edmond of Edmond Editing and Writing, and creator of the Writing Mindset blog, joined me to explore how to plan out and incorporate data into all the content we produce. Whether for Instagram, YouTube, blogs, or feature films (whatever floats your boat!), you need to choose, collect, weave in the right data to a compelling narrative.

The biggest takeaway? Start small, but get started! Treasa shared a brilliant way to take a first step - poll your audience, volunteer list, or past donors. Ask THEM who they are and what they want to hear about. Then you can both use that data to help guide your content and data strategies as well as put it in some content to share! And as a bonus, you're able to engage your audience and share ownership with them - really, a win-win-win.

Treasa Edmond is a best-selling nonfiction ghostwriter, content strategist, and collaborative writing coach. Her most recent project is launching a community for writers called “The Writing Mindset.” The Writing Mindset supports, inspires, and provides resources for every writer, new and experienced! During her years of writing and editing for clients, Treasa has gained a unique understanding of the mindset required to not only write content that connects with the reader, but also write in a way that enriches the writer. Treasa’s passion for helping others tell their story is equaled only by her love for reading and training her Standard Poodles.

Websites: www.edmondwriting.com   www.thewritingmindset.com

Connect with Treasa on Social Media!

Instagram: @thewritingmindset

Twitter: @treasae

Join her on Facebook at https://facebook.com/groups/thewritingmindset

What you measure matters - and not everything that matters can be measured. Sue Carter Kahl of Sue Carter Kahl Consulting knows that better than most. She joins me on this episode to discuss how we can use research that aligns with our purpose to improve our impact.

Dr. Kahl discusses how the best way to improve what we measure is not to start with the data themselves but rather always keep our organization's mission at the heart of what we do. Research can see scary, but really it's "an organized way of wondering" and we all have questions that we need answered, don't we? The trick is picking the questions that are centered on our purpose and who we serve.

Dr. Kahl runs an insightful and approachable blog called Volunteer Commons. Some of her posts related to today's discussion are:

What If We Stopped Counting Volunteer Hours?

When and Where to Use Wage Replacement Rates for Volunteer Value

Trading Measurement for Witnessing

Mission-Centered Volunteer Data Collection

The Tension Involved in Articulating Volunteer Impact

You don't need to be a data scientist to learn how to make data work for humans. In fact, one of the best ways to learn is to be on the receiving end of data projects, and that's exactly what happened to today's guest, Erik Dutilly. As a middle school teacher, Erik went through his district's attempts to bring down a data-driven culture from on high through a massive Tableau project. Erik shares his deep insight into why it didn't have the hoped-for results, and three critical ways that similar projects could succeed in the future. Spoiler alert - not one of those three interventions has to do with the technology or data themselves. It's all about how you focus on the humans that are part of the process. 

Erik Dutilly’s passions lie in education, psychology, and program evaluation. He seeks to apply insights from these fields to solving persistent societal problems. He has worked in public schools, consulted with non-profit groups, and currently works at the American Indian College Fund as an evaluator and researcher. He owns and operates an innovative private tutoring company called Research Inspired Tutoring in Boulder, Colorado where he applies data-driven decision-making principles to improve student learning. He received his masters and PhD in education from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Managing data safely, accurately, and ethically requires rules and procedures not just around how you collect the data, but also around how the data can be used and by whom. 

In this episode, taken from the Ascend Data Summit that Merakinos hosted in September, Alexandra talks with the Chief Data Strategy Officer from the American Hospital Assocation on what it takes to properly govern your data.

A great house will only last if it's built on a great foundation. Yet, we don't even see that foundation and we often forget it's even there. That's the same as data standards - setting processing in place that control how, when, and where data are collected and stored. If you have have different ways of defining, collecting, and processing data, it's the same as having part of your foundation made of sand, part of stone, part above ground, part below ground, and part not even finished yet! All too soon, the house will come down. 

So join Dave Saraiva, a co-founder and chief of products at the nonprofit CRM Driven, for an in-depth yet approachable discussion on how to get started with creating, implementing, and maintaining standards of data collection.

How do you talk to someone who thinks that vaccinations cause autism or Covid doesn't exist? Spoiler alert: not by calling them stupid or beating them into submission with data. In this intriguing discussion with the Chief Narrative Officer of Odd Duck, I get a first-hand walkthrough of how we can combat mis- and disinformation by first recognizing the shared humanity of the people we're talking to. Being data-driven isn't just about the data. It's also about the stories we tell with that data. 

Josh Gryniewicz is the founder and Chief Narrative Officer of Odd Duck at oddduck.io. He shares many resources throughout the episode:

Read more about what misinformation is and how we can manage it in a  "Post-Truth" world. 

Learn the Art of Data-Driven Story Building. 

Explore the work of Renee Diresta.

Read Josh's recommended book, "You Are Here" by Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner

Check out Dr. Rhea Boyd.

For many nonprofits, some of their most important data comes from fundraising efforts and donors. Getting the right fundraising database is critical to capturing, maintaining, and using that data. So how do you know if you're getting the "right" one? 

Join Chad Barger from Productive Fundraising to learn how to start with what's NOT working first, explore the available options without getting overwhelmed, and stay focused on what matters most. 

Chad Barger is the chief strategist and owner of the firm Productive Fundraising.  The firm teaches nonprofits how to be more efficient with their limited fundraising time by putting donors first and creating simple fundraising systems that deliver sustainable, growing revenue. To many fundraisers he is better known as @fundraiserchad, the host of a popular free monthly webinar series.  On his website, productivefundraising.com, Chad curates top notch fundraising toolkits designed to fast track implementation of fundraising best practices.  He’s also a bit of a personal productivity nerd and loves to share tips to help busy professionals work more efficiently and effectively.

Make sure to download Chad's Ultimate Guide To Fundraising that we discuss in the episode, and check out his Solicitation Performance Index spreadsheet that can track and calculate the nine components of successful fundraising.

We hear so much about managing our own fitness, but how's your organization's data fitness? Like staying in shape yourself, data fitness is about your nonprofit's ability to respond well to outside challenges, adapt and bounce back, and most important get to where you want to go as efficiently as possible. 

Paul Collier of CoEffect has laid out five key traits of data fitness. We cover each one of these in today's episode, and show steps that anyone can take to improve their, their team, and their organization's data fitness.

Paul offers several great resources in the show. You can get them here:

Quiz to help you assess your team's data fitness

Guide to creating your organization's Theory of Change

Primer on data literacy / data fluency and a downloadable template for educating your team

Paul Collier has led Coeffect since 2016 and has consulted with over 35 for-impact clients across Colorado, California, and Washington D.C. Paul has also led trainings around impact measurement strategy for hundreds of nonprofit professionals through the Colorado Nonprofit Association, Nonprofit Learning Lab, and Social Venture Partners Denver. Prior to Coeffect, Paul served as the Data and Evaluation Manager at Safe & Sound, a leading family resource center developing a data-informed model to help families raise thriving kids. He also worked for Protiviti, an international consulting firm providing internal audit services to Fortune 500 clients. 

If anyone wants to learn more about how to build their org's data fitness, they are more than welcome to schedule time to chat with Paul or send him an email ([email protected]).

We hear so much about managing our own fitness, but how's your organization's data fitness? Like staying in shape yourself, data fitness is about your nonprofit's ability to respond well to outside challenges, adapt and bounce back, and most important get to where you want to go as efficiently as possible. 

Paul Collier of CoEffect has laid out five key traits of data fitness. We cover each one of these in today's episode, and show steps that anyone can take to improve their, their team, and their organization's data fitness.

Paul offers several great resources in the show. You can get them here:

Quiz to help you assess your team's data fitness

Guide to creating your organization's Theory of Change

Primer on data literacy / data fluency and a downloadable template for educating your team

Paul Collier has led Coeffect since 2016 and has consulted with over 35 for-impact clients across Colorado, California, and Washington D.C. Paul has also led trainings around impact measurement strategy for hundreds of nonprofit professionals through the Colorado Nonprofit Association, Nonprofit Learning Lab, and Social Venture Partners Denver. Prior to Coeffect, Paul served as the Data and Evaluation Manager at Safe & Sound, a leading family resource center developing a data-informed model to help families raise thriving kids. He also worked for Protiviti, an international consulting firm providing internal audit services to Fortune 500 clients. 

If anyone wants to learn more about how to build their org's data fitness, they are more than welcome to schedule time to chat with Paul or send him an email ([email protected]).

What does pointillism (those cool pictures that are actually made of thousands of tiny dots) have in common with data? Join Russell Presgraves from the Parkinson's Foundation for a conversation on how we can see most clearly when we bring our data together. It's not an accident that Russell understands the power of the bigger story - he's actually an English major who's taught himself everything he needs to know about database management, analysis, and data visualization.