Starting Over - Sometimes You Gotta Get Lost To Find Yourself
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Community Member, Brent Troth, recently switched organizations after 10 years and shares his experience. Give this blog a "LIKE" to vote for it to win the bbcon blog contest!
Whenever I move to a new city, I like to get to know the place by just getting lost. Driving around to see what I can find, and challenge myself to find my way home again – no GPS, no maps. Drive until you don't know where you are and then drive more until you do.
Recently, I transitioned from an RE DBA job I’d held for nearly ten years and took on a similar roll with a new organization. In my previous RE database, I was confident in my ability to navigate any query, export, report, or analysis of that data. Now I’m getting to know RE all over again and it’s time to get lost.
My first few days I actually spent driving around my new data playing “I wonder”. I wonder how many constituents there are in the database? What was total fundraising the past few years? What was donor retention like in that time? How many donors give at various levels and what percentage of revenue is generated at each level? How many donors are giving at capacity based on the analytics ratings? I used the answers to create an initial database analysis report to share my findings.
When you’re done being lost, you’ll not only find you have a good map, but you'll have new and better ways to help your organization get where it needs to go.
Recently, I transitioned from an RE DBA job I’d held for nearly ten years and took on a similar roll with a new organization. In my previous RE database, I was confident in my ability to navigate any query, export, report, or analysis of that data. Now I’m getting to know RE all over again and it’s time to get lost.
My first few days I actually spent driving around my new data playing “I wonder”. I wonder how many constituents there are in the database? What was total fundraising the past few years? What was donor retention like in that time? How many donors give at various levels and what percentage of revenue is generated at each level? How many donors are giving at capacity based on the analytics ratings? I used the answers to create an initial database analysis report to share my findings.
When you’re done being lost, you’ll not only find you have a good map, but you'll have new and better ways to help your organization get where it needs to go.
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Organizational Best Practices Blog
09/03/2018 7:55pm EDT
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