Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

It’s easy to always be sure that we know what we know, right? A lot of the time, what we know actually IS true - and sometimes - we walk around with something that we “know” that isn’t true anymore, or maybe wasn’t true, ever. I remember when one of my nieces told me that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. I humored her for a bit, cornered my sister to ask what was going on at my niece’s school - and then found out later that my niece was mostly right - better science means that we get to change our mind, we get to “know” more about the dinosaurs. And it looks like warm blooded might be the better answer to know.

There are lessons here in the nonprofit world, particularly when it comes to measuring your successes and failures:

• Make the time to periodically review what you think you know, and check your assumptions.
  • Who are your top donors?
  • How much time do you lose when your team can’t update you website?
  • What is the total cost of a new database?
  • Does your e-newsletter get more hits when you send on a Wednesday or a Monday morning?
• Take a step back and ask if you’re measuring the right thing.
  • Is the total number of records in your donor database tell you what you need to know?
  • Perhaps you should be looking at the inactive folks in that database to determine why they are inactive.
• Is your database really as terrible as you think?
  • Maybe it’s a training gap that you can fix quickly and easily.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for advice.
  • We all can’t know everything, and we all make mistakes.
  • Decision making by committee isn’t always a great idea - but I’ve rarely been disappointed with information gathering by committee.
  • Cultivate people with a different point of view, set of experiences, belief set. You’ll learn something, and so will they.

I love to be right, don’t get me wrong. But you know what? I can change my mind to be right, and often times, that’s even better: I’ll have learned something, acquired new and better information, and will be better equipped to find “right” the next time -because I checked some assumptions, I measured the right stuff, and I asked for help!