Late October is a revealing time to look at a charity database manager’s to-do list. Christmas appeal data is being prepared, year-end reporting is on the horizon, someone needs a list for the carol service, and the clean-up project planned for the summer is still sitting where it was.
None of it is unimportant, and that is exactly the difficulty. Patrick Lencioni put it neatly: if everything is important, then nothing is. When every request carries the same weight, the work that would make the biggest difference tends to get pushed back by whatever arrived most recently.
The answer usually isn’t working faster or juggling more. It’s juggling less, on purpose, and making sure the people who depend on you can see what you’ve chosen. Here’s an approach that works for charity data teams of any size, including teams of one.
1. Get it all out of your head
Start by writing everything down: projects, deadlines, requests, and the things you’re quietly worried about. A pen and a sheet of paper works as well as any software, and often better, because it’s quick and you can see it all at once.
Then, for each item, note two things:
- Who is waiting for it, and when they actually need it
- What it depends on, such as another team’s data, a supplier, or a decision nobody has made yet
The dependencies are often where the real tangle is. A task that looks small can be stuck behind three others, and a task that looks huge may only be waiting on one answer.
2. Share the list
A priority list that only you can see doesn’t help anyone else. Share it with your manager and the teams who rely on you, even informally: a short email, a shared document, five minutes at a team meeting.
It helps in two ways. People can see where their request sits and why, which cuts down the chasing. And when something new arrives, the conversation becomes “which of these should move?” rather than “can you just squeeze this in?”
3. Pick three things a day
Choose three meaningful tasks each day: the work that needs focus, not the inbox or the quick lookups. Small requests will still come in, and many of them still need doing. But protecting time for three real pieces of work is what moves the bigger projects forward.
Three is deliberately modest. Finishing three things feels very different from starting ten.
An example: cleaning up your CRM
Say your database badly needs a tidy-up. “Clean the database” is too big to start, so it never quite starts. Narrow it to three areas that affect your users every day:
- Supporter categories, such as constituent codes in Raiser’s Edge NXT or contact types in other systems. Who are our supporters, and do the categories still reflect that?
- Activity and communication types. What do we contact people about, and are we recording it consistently?
- Attributes and custom fields. Which options are we carrying around that nobody uses any more?
Fixing just these three often makes a noticeable difference straight away: cleaner selections, simpler data entry, and reports people trust a little more. It also gives you a finished piece of work to point to, rather than a project that’s permanently “in progress”.
4. If a deadline is going to slip, say so early
Nobody enjoys delivering bad news. But telling someone two weeks ahead that a report will be late gives them options. Telling them on the day gives them a problem.
Most people are reasonable when they’re told early and honestly. They can move a meeting, use last month’s figures, or help decide what else can wait. What they find hard is silence followed by a last-minute surprise.
Look after the person doing the work
Charity data people are often the ones who keep things running when the pressure is on, and that’s a real strength. But taking on more and more for a long stretch isn’t sustainable for anyone. A clear, shared list of priorities protects the work, and it protects you too.
If your team is working through a long data backlog and would like help deciding what to tackle first, get in touch with the ADA team. We’re happy to help you work out where to start.