Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

I was getting ready to head out the door today for a run with my brother Frank. We’d chatted about if we needed new shoes or not, so I fired up my trusty running log, and checked a couple of things.

I started with total mileage - I wanted to see how many miles I’ve run this year compared to last year. At first glance - it looked about right - a lot more than last year. Thing is - Frank and I had also trained for a marathon, so warning bells didn’t go off in my head.

But when I checked my shoe mileage - WOW! The report said I’d almost 600 miles on my shoes, and I KNEW that wasn’t right. It didn’t take long to find the data entry that SHOULD have said 5.5 miles, but which was incorrectly entered as 555 miles!

When we help customers into a new database - we’ll set up some reports and so on. But we don’t know your data, you do. Over time, the reports we gave you to start may become less valuable for a lot of reasons:

• You have inaccurate or incomplete data
• Your needs have changed but the report hasn’t

So - you need to know before you click. You SHOULD have an expectation of what you are going to see BEFORE you press the go button - and - if you are going to make business decisions based on the data in that report - you’ll want to double check.

At NPower, we were reviewing our Salesforce setup, and noticed a couple of reports that didn’t seem right. Since I’m not deeply engaged in our fundraising - I probably wouldn’t have noticed. But our fundraising team? They spotted a pair of mis-categorizations right away - they knew that there must be data that was included in a report that didn’t belong.

It was easy to fix the report, but harder to fix the process. We’re tracking data differently than when we first began using Salesforce - and we’re due to update some of the ways we’ve configured our reports. The actual adjustments will be easy. Working out the business rules won’t be too hard - but will take some time. We’ll have to get the right people in the room, ask the right questions, think about how things are and how we want them to be, and then decide how much of our time and money to invest in making those changes.

So - a pair of important things to remember:

1. Know before you click! If you’re looking for event attendance reports - you should have a good idea of what you’ll see when you generate that report. And if you don’t - make sure that someone on your team does - or that you truth check the report carefully!
2. Plan to re-visit your processes and reports every year or two. For instance - your definition of a top donor might change over time, and you’ll want to make sure that your reports reflect those changes.