Data Literacy for Small Nonprofits with Sarah Epting
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Hello and welcome to Nonprofit Nation.
I'm your host Julia Campbell and I'm going to sit down with non-profit industry experts,
fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build
that movement that you've been dreaming of.
I created the Nonprofit Nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you
confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build
your movement.
If you're a non-profit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility,
reach more people, and create even more impact than you're in the right place.
Let's get started.
Hi everyone.
Hello, all my lovely non-profit unicorns.
This is Julia Campbell, your host for this episode of Nonprofit Nation.
Today, we're going to be talking about data literacy, which sounds like a dry topic, but
honestly, I think that it's incredibly important.
We're going to discuss which kind of data, what data non-profits should collect and use,
how to choose, a helpful and lean tech stack, understanding the best kind of data for our
non-profits needs, and then really just kind of figuring out where to go and what to do
and why.
I have a data literacy expert with me today with 10 years of non-profit management and
five years of specialized Salesforce Administrator experience.
Sarah Epting leverages unprecedented knowledge of the hurdles non-profits often face.
Upon graduating from Georgia State University as an MPA in non-profit management, that's
also my degree.
So, yay, MPA's.
She's dedicated herself to aiding non-profits in their growth with the help of technology.
This part of the bio, I especially love because it's like the why.
In her role as a non-profit manager, she often encountered the same issue.
Non-profits frequently stretch their resources thin and fail to take advantage of the available
technology to organize their internal systems and improve their fundraising efforts.
She founded Technopath to address the gaps in the industry, leveraging her Salesforce
expertise to help non-profits further their mission.
And Sarah holds six Salesforce certifications.
She's an experienced speaker having presented at both non-profit conventions and Salesforce
events.
So, welcome, Sarah.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me, Julia.
It's exciting.
Okay.
Hello, MBA in non-profit management.
MPA, I should say.
Oh my gosh.
We're not MBAs.
We're MPAs.
Where did you start your journey and tell me a little bit about how you founded your company
and what you do now?
Well, actually, I think you said prior to this, when we were talking before, that you
have a journalism background, I actually got a journalism degree as my bachelor's degree.
And I was looking and it was in 2004.
So there's a big shift in newspaper starting to change in things.
And I decided to take an internship at the Women's Sports Foundation as a publication
assistant.
So I would get to write the newsletter articles and interview the athletes and that sort of
thing.
But I then shifted into non-profits from there.
So marketing and that sort of thing.
And I worked for the Georgia Lions Lighthouse Foundation for the bulk of my non-profit for
about seven years and they helped low income Georgians get eyeglasses, eye surgeries and
hearing aids.
And when I started there, we didn't have an email blast system.
We didn't have anything marketing going.
So I got that going.
But as you know, small non-profits, you learn mini hats.
And so I had the fundraising hat eventually and also technology.
So I was doing marketing, fundraising and technology because I was the one who was willing to try
to learn SQL to pull reports for the foundation as we grew.
I took a class on it and I realized later that I actually ended up doing that prior
to that in my dorm room and everybody needed to set up ethernet.
I was the one helping them figure it out.
I had been the one who figured it out.
Amazing.
I'm sure they very much appreciated that.
Right.
So I pick up technology fairly easily.
And like you said, in the bio, I noticed when I work at non-profits and any of the work
that I did at non-profits that there was this gap between what is available and also the
knowledge that's available.
So I've really focused my company on training non-profits.
In my case, specifically on how to use Salesforce, that we're looking to expand to more things
like data collection and how to use Excel and that sort of thing, specifically to non-profits
and also teaching people who are trying to get in to their Salesforce careers how to
help non-profits and understand non-profits better because a lot of times somebody might
want to go in and say, oh, I just trained on this.
I just took a class on this.
I would have volunteered to help you.
And then if you don't know non-profit business and you don't understand how non-profits work,
so that's a piece of what I do.
And that's kind of been my journey with and through non-profit.
I find that a lot of us start our businesses because of a frustration that we had when
we were working full-time.
So for me, I started my business actually as a grant writer for hire.
And what I found was a lot of organizations just didn't have the bandwidth or the capacity
to have a grant writer on staff or their development director was so strained being probably like
you a development communications and tech person and did not have the time to research
and write and report on grants.
So we find these pain points and we build businesses around them.
And I love that you did that.
So tell me about the work that you do right now.
So right now I am focused on training.
Like I said, people who are interested in Salesforce on helping non-profits.
So I train them to successfully put together a non-profit system for a non-profit and what
would be important to a non-profit.
And then I train non-profits in a bespoke way to help them learn their system and understand
their systems.
And sometimes it's something that I didn't even think of.
As like you said, as you find these pain points, so I'm working with smaller non-profits
sometimes and I didn't realize that they weren't mail merging their thank you letters.
They didn't know what mail merge was.
And so to be, they were typing each person's name and address into the thank you letters
or into their asks and requests.
And if you're listening to this and you don't know what mail merge is, please Google it.
Please.
I think a lot of people know it but there are things that I didn't even realize you didn't
know.
So I train in a bespoke way to non-profits and I'm developing some more group trainings.
And then also I have a handful of clients where I do some coaching.
So they're the database person.
They're keeping track of their database but they have specific questions.
So we just sit down and they drive while I talk them through how to do what they do.
So I'm coaching them through that.
Perfect.
And then I help the CDC Foundation.
That's my big client that I help with their data because they went through a massive shift
with individual donors.
So when COVID hit, they went from having 750 individual donors to 180,000.
So talk about data literacy and combing through data and figuring out not only just how to
get that data into their system but also how to pull it out in a meaningful way.
So I helped them with that.
Amazing.
So wow, what we could talk about the CDC Foundation for days because I'm a huge fan.
So what is data literacy?
Because it sounds like something that maybe the average development director doesn't have
to worry about but I know that you beg to differ and I totally beg to differ.
So what is data literacy and why is it especially important for nonprofits?
Well data literacy is the ability to read, work with and analyze and communicate with
data.
So in some industries, it's crucial like the medical field.
On an individual level, your doctor needs to be able to look at your blood work, your
scans, other data points like your age, your weight, your family history to make a whole
wellness plan for you if you're lucky.
Even with all the knowledge that they have of the human body, they need to be able to
have that data and interpret that to be able to heal you, to prescribe the medication or
tell you what diet you should have.
It's the same for nonprofits.
Trying to solve problems and move their mission forward, you'll see some data communicated
in annual reports which make for lovely graphics.
More importantly, it's what the funders are looking for as you strategize on how to raise
money for your organization.
So if I'm a foundation and I'm interested in funding workforce development, I'm more
interested in funding a program that has an 89% retention rate after one year than a 50%
retention rate after one year.
And the nonprofit can't tell that story unless they have the data, unless they're following
the graduates and they're keeping track of, that's a data point that I want to know at
the end of the year.
That's a data point that I want to be able to tell my funders.
And the understanding that that is something you have to keep track of is data literacy.
The organizations have to decide what that data is that they want to track and understand
that they can measure it just like you can measure blood work, just like you can measure
other things.
You can measure data points that funders are looking for.
So beyond just funders, it sounds like this is something that could really benefit program
effectiveness.
Yes, exactly.
So it could really have, it has implications in almost every department.
What are some of the ways we can use this for, you know, to increase program impact?
I would say to set benchmarks.
So when I worked at the Georgia Lions Lighthouse Foundation, we came to actually where I just
moved now, my family's Lake House for a two day long retreat to really do our strategic
planning and thinking about where we wanted our programs to go.
And we said we want 70% of people to feel a certain way or we want, we set these benchmarks.
You want people to say they feel less isolated because of their hearing aids and they feel
more comfortable in social settings because of their hearing aids or they can see to drive
and feel more independent because of their glasses.
And so we decided what those benchmarks and data that we wanted to collect at the beginning
of our strategic plan and that was able, we were able to see if we could meet those goals.
So yes, I am a fundraiser so I think of it as funding but really you're making more
of an impact when you are deciding what data to collect and you're moving your mission
forward and you're helping more people if you're looking at the data.
And if you're seeing one thing, so one of the, I think the one, the data points was
something very, I don't want to say food food.
But something that couldn't...
Qualitative.
Yes, it was quality.
Antidodal.
It was something that you couldn't really measure like enjoyment of life or something
that we couldn't...
Okay, you could measure that though, couldn't you do like on a scale from one to five?
Well, I guess so.
I guess.
I can't remember what it was but after we analyzed the data after a year we were like,
okay, well we can't really measure this.
I can't remember which data point it was.
So you have to re-look at it after a while and say, is this working?
But in terms of getting the program from point A to point Z, knowing where you want
to end up, one of my favorite shows is Grace and Frankie.
And there's an episode where she's negotiating a deal for her product at Grace's daughter's
beauty company.
And she's given the advice, figure out where you want to end up and then don't start there.
Meaning, aim high as a negotiation tactic.
But I think that that's what we should do as nonprofits.
We aim high as we set these goals for ourselves as the programs and then we decide how we're
going to measure it.
So usually for us at the Lighthouse Foundation it was follow-up surveys that we had an incentive
for hearing aids we had to work with audiologists and ENTs.
So we had it so that if the audiologist didn't have the patient fill out the survey then they
didn't get their last payment.
So we pretty much always got the surveys because the doctor had the incentive to get
the payment for their services.
I think it was like that.
Don't quote me on that exactly.
It was something to that effect where it wasn't just, oh well we have to rely on somebody to
fill back out a survey.
There was an incentive or a requirement for them to fill out the survey to receive service
or something like that so that we had the pre-survey with the application and we were
able to get the post survey and compare the data.
This is really interesting because I've worked in organizations where I feel like it's
very easy to give data on how many people were served.
So this many people stayed at our shelter.
This many people received services.
This many people came to the food bank, those kinds of things but it's very hard to measure
that data afterward.
So how can small shops especially start on this kind of data literacy journey?
I think to be digger-ler is to know if the foundation or whoever that asks you for a
statistic can actually be understood.
So I always, like I said, have a developer, a development mindset, a fundraising mindset.
So I think about what foundations and what donors the data that they're asking for but
one, can it really be achieved?
And even if you take technology out of for a small shop altogether, if you wanted to
figure out how you were impacting say that workforce development program that I talked
about, say you're a small town, you have a workforce development program or you're trying
to make sure that people are employed, you have your paper calendars, all of your case
managers have address books and you could start there and just say, hey, we're going
to spend two days looking at our calendars, looking at our notes, noticing trends and
writing them down and come back and brainstorm together.
So even if it's not even technology, another easy lift I think would be there's so many
online classes now or just going to a workshop on nonprofit data collection.
So if you've googled that right now and also understanding how to use some of the technology.
So let's back up from the paper and say, how do I use Excel?
I just signed up for an Excel course from this Excel, M-I-S-S, Excel and she is great.
Like she sent something in a newsletter today.
I was like, oh, that's a new feature to.
My husband is completely obsessed with Excel and is trying to get me on the Excel bandwagon
and I'm going to be like, you should check out Ms. Excel.
I'm writing it down.
Yes, in my end, I'll get that Excel.
But I think that for small shops, just starting with the basics in terms of what you track
and make it more what you were talking about, the quantitative, how many people are we seeing
and if it's an animal shelter, how many adoptions are there, that's perfectly fine to have
that quantitative data.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Being able to understand to your point of the programs earlier, to be able to understand
how to use that data to move your mission forward, that's the hard part.
And that means looking at that data and saying, are we where we want to be?
Just like a for-profit company, benchmarks and has key measurements, it's the same thing
with nonprofits.
How do we use that data to move our mission forward?
So what do nonprofits often get wrong when collecting data?
And just to add to this, I have been reading a lot about this and I've been hearing things
like unconscious bias and those kinds of terms.
And I'm certainly not a data literacy expert, so I'm asking you, what do nonprofits get
wrong and maybe how can we avoid these pitfalls?
I think the biggest one that I see because a lot of what I do or I have done in the past
is help people set up their technology is for setting up a system to collect data.
You can't read data literate unless you have the data to read.
You can't be literate unless you have a book.
So some capture not enough while others capture too much.
And also what I find a lot of nonprofits do is they sign up for too many systems.
And I say a lot of nonprofits, I'm guilty of it too.
It's a small business person because you want your frustrated with finding the data, you're
frustrated with being able to reach your constituents and you get MailChimp and then
you get SurveyMonkey and then you get Eventbrite and then you get some other event system to
track registrations because you think, oh, Eventbrite's too pub.
Line up genius.
And yeah, I mean that people, what happens is a lot of times, especially at small nonprofits,
they have a small workforce, they have board members and committee members or volunteers
just interjecting, oh, I use this here and I use that.
So then I had, I was working with one nonprofit that had three different payment processors,
two different places that donations were actually coming in, neither of them connected to their
sales force properly.
And so it's just, and it was just kind of like you have a thread and it just gets all tangled
and balled up.
I mean, that happens.
It just is snowballs.
And so I think in terms of actual collection, the technology piece can be something that
they get wrong.
In terms of bias and collecting bias, I am not an expert on that.
So I wouldn't be able to speak to bias in terms of what nonprofits are measuring or collecting.
It's something that we need to explore.
It's just something I've heard.
And if anyone listening is an expert, I'm happy to entertain any questions or any articles,
any resources that you have.
And I think this leads into the kind of data that we should be collecting.
So how do we know what data we should collect?
Because you said what nonprofits might often get wrong is they might get into collecting
too much data and it just gets into data over while and then data overload.
So how do we know what we should be collecting?
And then I guess the second piece of it, how can we use it effectively?
So it doesn't just kind of sit in a spreadsheet.
Yeah, I mean, I would go back to what I was saying before about really doing some forward
thinking.
It's the beginning of the year.
And think about what impacts you're trying to make with goal statements.
So the life and self-sufficiency was retained or regained because of our vision and hearing
services.
One of the ones we had brainstormed and then we brainstormed indicators of that, like I
said, with for the hearing, especially social, it's being able to hear in church or other
services that you are attending, things that you're attending.
So really then where do we want to end up?
So I think that knowing what data to collect is really knowing the data that indicates
that you're achieving your mission.
So what is your mission as the American Cancer Society?
Is it to eradicate cancer?
Well, then the data we want to look at is how much research we've done, what have those
developments that we've helped to fund due to decrease the occurrence of cancer?
Or maybe it's deaths or that kind of thing.
So in terms of programs, knowing what data to collect starts at the beginning of looking
at your mission and saying, how is my mission fulfilled?
Is my mission too broad?
I find that a lot of nonprofits, if your mission is to eradicate poverty in your community,
what indicates that you're doing that and can that ever be achieved?
Is that really an achievable mission?
And you know, visions, admissions can be a little bit more out there and blue sky world
and then we can come up with goals to make ourselves.
So what are the problems?
What is some data that we can collect that doesn't have anything to do with the services
we're providing but what's happening in our community?
What is something that is going wrong?
What is the problem you're trying to solve?
If you know the problem you're trying to solve, what are the things that will help you
get there?
And once you identify what those, then you can say, how do I measure that?
And sometimes that can be difficult to figure out and the pre and post surveys are a great
way to do that.
There's also things that are more towards American Cancer Society where they actually
are doing research or the CDC Foundation.
Public health is really important to them.
So we were talking yesterday in a meeting about how one reason that it's hard to say
what you measure is how do you say that you prevented a problem from that that never
happened to public health is all about preventing disease.
So how can you prove that your efforts help prevent disease?
So when the Ebola outbreak happened in 2015 and Obama put into place a system to help
with that as well as the CDC Foundation came in and activated for emergency response during
that time, well, we all know about the COVID pandemic, but we don't know about an Ebola
pandemic because it was shut down.
So that can be very difficult to express the importance of that.
And that's an education piece rather than a data piece.
What did we do that is a small little thing that didn't, not small, very large thing that
we did that took a small amount of time, but to express how that impacted the world.
That brings me to a great question that I have for you because a lot of my clients,
interestingly, work on legislative advocacy and work on changing systems and changing
laws or just changing beliefs, changing structures.
And exactly what you said, how can you quantify a change?
So I guess a good example is how we all know that fewer people are smoking, right?
Fewer people are buying cigarettes, fewer people are smoking.
We just know it, we see it, and it's demonstrable and it's something that is quantifiable.
But who can claim credit for that?
And also, those are the kinds of things that I always think about.
How can you prove to your donors, to your foundations, to your grantors, to your corporate
sponsors that you've kind of moved the needle on things?
I'd love to hear your opinion on some of the ways that we could do that.
I think that some of that's taking outside academic research, really relying on our folks
in the universities and that sort of thing where they're doing research in general on,
okay, I wrote an amicus brief or something to support, a supporting letter of a piece
of legislation.
What are the inflection points?
Because it's hard to know.
There is less data on that that you can actually capture for yourself.
So what you need to do is look at studies and studies have shown that if you do this,
then this will be x will be, if you do x, y will be the result.
So if that's the case, then you look to that and say, this is why we're doing x because
we're hoping for y.
And this is the person that we spoke to that is an expert in this field or this is the
reason that we're thinking that this would, you know, explain your reasoning rather than
data in those cases in terms of making appeals and appeals to either legislative bodies or
donors.
Either way, you're needing to appeal to both their logic and their emotions, which can't
always be quantified in data.
But if you can say, if you've been doing it for 50 years, as we approach it, things and
do x, it always ends up in y.
Here are the things that the laws that have been passed since we started doing this work.
I get that from Sandy Hook Promise since me.
Oh my gosh, I love seeing that.
And they'll say, this is what we've done and here's some laws that were passed and we still
have a long way to go and they'll just outline, they'll do the emotional appeals, but then
also they do have what is the work that we're doing with your donations.
Mm hmm.
That's a perfect example because that is a legislative advocacy organization that I
actually do support and I love their work.
I support a lot of advocacy organizations only because I can't fight the fight every day
myself.
Okay, I need other people to fight the fight.
I will put the money.
I will sign the things.
I will call my legislators, but I cannot be on the ground every single day.
And that's what I tell my clients is you can't say $100 funds x if you're an advocacy organization.
You can't tell a funder that 30,000 people were helped by this one thing.
You can say we have, like you just said, evidence that it pushed the needle on something.
The other point that I think a lot of my listeners are probably thinking about that I was just
thinking about is we cannot put ourselves out of business.
It's not possible.
It's not like when you are helping people that are experiencing homelessness, you just
think, oh, I'm going to end homelessness.
That's not possible or end relationship violence or end food insecurity.
These are things that we will always be grappling with.
So when I was a grant writer, I used to get very frustrated because I would say, how do
you expect me to show that relationship violence and intimate partner violence is down because
that's a major structural systemic problem that we're dealing with?
So I guess my question is what if you're dealing with that kind of thing, how do you
express to your donor and your funder?
What is your recommendation to kind of communicate your results and still be positive but still
be sort of saying that this is a problem we're not going to solve overnight?
Right.
Well, I would say is your goal to solve the problem or aid the problem in terms of relationship
abuse, violence.
I would say that is it that your interact is an organization in Raleigh, North Carolina
where I used to live and they're a women's domestic violence shelter.
So they have people come every day to get help and that is what they're doing.
They're helping individuals get to a better place in their lives.
They're not ending the systemic issue.
If you're working to end a systemic issue like climate change, again going back to the
if you do X, it will result in Y.
You just keep trying to push that needle and I like what you are saying about how I
can't be the one to be doing the advocacy every day.
I really like that because sometimes it's harder for people to support an organization
that advocates or an organization that prevents something versus something like what I just
said, an organization that's helping individuals get to a better place in their lives.
I don't know necessarily the answer.
Sure.
But I think that knowing in terms of being data literate as this conversation is around
is just knowing that when to pull that outside data, when to use the data that you are getting
as an organization as the results of what you're doing and when to interpret things in
a qualitative way rather than a quantitative way.
I love that.
Thank you for bringing that all back together to data literacy.
Where can we find out more about you, learn more about you and techno path and the kind
of work that you're doing?
Well, our website is technopath.io.
We have links there.
If you're a nonprofit, you can click and learn about us.
If you're a Salesforce learner, either a nonprofit or just somebody who's learning Salesforce,
that if you click on I'm a Salesforce learner, that will take you to all our courses and
information.
I also have a LinkedIn group called Salesforce Saturday for nonprofits.
I meet every Saturday.
There's a topic you want to discuss or a use case scenario that you want us to walk through
and you want some people to bounce ideas off of.
You can bring them to me.
Like I said, we meet every Saturday.
I'm always looking for content.
This Saturday, we're going to talk about Zap here, which is a program that connects different
programs together.
It's all around, like I said, it's called Salesforce Saturday.
That one's very Salesforce specific, but it's just trying to focus on how nonprofits
can benefit from using the technology and having a data literacy conversation.
We've had those before and if you join the LinkedIn group, just search for Salesforce
Saturday for nonprofits, you'll get a link to over 90 videos.
We've been doing this for two years.
So we have a lot of episodes.
I guess you would call them of these webinars that we do every week.
Sarah, I really appreciate you taking the time and I know I threw some crazy questions
at you, but this was a fantastic conversation and I actually learned a lot.
So thank you so much for being here.
Okay, thank you for having me.
Well, hey there.
I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the
end.
I really enjoyed today's conversation.
Make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app and you'll get new episodes
downloaded as soon as they come out.
I would love if you left me a rating or a review because this tells other people that
my podcast is worth listening to and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds
and create even more impact.
So that's pretty much it.
I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then, you can find me on Instagram
at Julia Campbell77.
Keep changing the world, you non-profit unicorn.
Bye.
Bye.
.