July 2024 Challenge: Learning from Mistakes

Crystal Bruce

Thank you to the Blackbaud Community All-Stars for this month's challenge question. What is a mistake you made that turned into a great learning opportunity? Let's embrace our blunders and share our ‘oops’ moments and how you turned it into a valuable learning experience!

Carlene Johnson

@Crystal Bruce Love this challenge!

Here is (one of) my biggest OOPS! At my very first RE job I was in working over the weekend and I accidently deleted every. single. query. in the database. It was back on the DOS version so was much easier to make a keystroke error.

My IT person refused to restore from backup - though I don't know why.

Things I learned:
*Slow down
*Make sure you have a recovery plan that has been discussed with IT and others
*We all make mistakes - and we can recover from them

The upside was that it meant my team had to re-think everything we were doing. It was a good practice to reconsider who was on the newsletter mailing list or appeal mailing list and allowed us to not do things just because “we've always done it that way”.

Keith Wilson

@Carlene Johnson “*slow down”

Absolutely slow down!! The old adage “measure twice, cut once” also applies to the “Delete” function in database! Think twice before you delete anything! ?

My oops moment was merging “duplicate” records. I merged a Father/Son record (Sr/Jr) and deleted the supposed duplicate. It wasn't worth the time and effort to restore from backup, so I had to recreate the entire son's record (including gift records) which wasn't easy trying to figure out which gifts were on the father's record and which ones belonged to the son. Definitely learned my lesson to slow down!

Marie Allen

@Crystal Bruce I agree slow down and use your queries to double check your numbers. When setting up the procedures for my position, I found that taking clips and screen shots was very helpful rather than just writing out instructions. The big oops I did when I started was I didn't realize that when you import payroll gifts, and need to change one, don't reupload the whole thing. I ended up with like 4 imports for one payday. (I know) Also, work on your Excel skills, even just basic spreadsheet knowledge has improved my accuracy.

Austen Brown

@Carlene Johnson - Completely agree! Mistakes are inevitable, but what truly matters is how you recover and what you take away from it. Although blunders never feel good in the moment, failures are a crucial part of learning; they are the feedback loop that highlights areas that can be improved and adjusted.

One of my bigger “whoopsie” moments was when I accidentally unposted every gift in the database. I was moving too fast, trying to save a few seconds, and it ended up costing me four hours. I learned that rushing leads to missed details and questionable decisions. It's better to take the time to do it right the first time.

Dan Snyder

@Crystal Bruce Shared in the Champions thread on the same topic as well.

Several years ago we were using NetCommunuty to send our emails. When testing we would put TEST: in front of the subject line. There was one time where I wanted to test something just with myself so I named it with Dan test: at the front.

All looked good so I sent it out with Dan Test at the front! Thankfully I have a great boss and with grace on her part we talked about making sure it wouldn’t happen again. It turned out the email performed pretty well but it was pretty embarrassing.

Carlene Johnson

@Austen Brown
I like to remind myself, and my colleagues, that “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast!"

Vicky Lopuchowycz

@Crystal Bruce
I've inadvertently deleted enough things that I now take screenshots of things 1st so if I need to fill something back in, I know what was there!

Mistakes are our greatest teachers though!

Jennifer Kluh

@Crystal Bruce
Data Clean UP!!! Merging a wrong constituent into another and having to fix my errors.

Slowing down and doing more research before clean up! ?

Dawn Alonso

@Crystal Bruce

Student Billing has a lot of behind-the-scenes details. This year we added a new billing item. No biggie right, go in set up my fee, put it on my check sheet to add to student accounts when doing the billing, easy peasy lemon squeezy right. Billing done, send out my pushpage, parents start calling for payment plans. Oooops didn't set up the payment plans yet, but that is as simple as copy right??? Copy while on the phone with a parent, set their payment plan and move on. Thankfully that student didn't have that particular new fee, but 8 days later someone does and my calculations were not coming out correct and darn it I couldn't see that fee to add it to the payment plan…. Right-o forgot to add that fee to all of the payment plans. Now here I set adding it to all of the plans and editing the doc for how to add a new payment plan to include “add new fee to all payment plans for the billing year.” Thankfully mom was really understanding that I had and “IT issue” that I needed to look into and I called her 5 minutes later to set her up.

Lesson is to think through all of the places a new edition could affect things. And up date how to manuals regularly.

Angela Finley Hunter

@Crystal Bruce
Wow, what a great question. My humbling mistake was not renaming all the files I scanned before uploading them into each grantees profile. I figured I scanned them in order so it's fine. Well, my system uploaded them in alpha order. Yep, I uploaded the wrong backup files to different grantees profiles. Finally, when I finished, I decided to look at one and just wanted to faint. ? That was the first and last time, I didn't rename the files and double check them. I corrected everything that night at home.

Angela Finley Hunter

@Jennifer Kluh
OMG Jennifer, I know what you mean. My other humbling mistake was not only did I merge the wrong profiles. I deleted most of the information from one of them. I definitely learned research is the key to data clean up. ?

Angela Finley Hunter

@Vicky Lopuchowycz
Great idea!

Jeanette Rodriguez

@Crystal Bruce - I agree with everyone--SLOW DOWN! My biggest mistake occurred when merging duplicate records for the first time in RE 7.9. The merge went without a hitch, but I did not delete the source record during the merge. I went back to delete the duplicate record and ended up deleting the “good” record!? Thankfully, our IT team kept an updated sample database environment and I reconstructed the record manually without having to resort to a backup from the day before. It was a time-consuming experience, but it won't ever happen again! I learned my lesson!

Miki Martin

@Crystal Bruce at my last position, I was doing a Global Add for a birthday mailing we did for alumnae. I verified all the information for the Action was correct, including the date mailed and all. Added the Action to all 300 or so records. Went and checked and the query was pulling the wrong month of birthdays. Luckily I hadn't done other Actions that day so deleting the incorrect ones was easy enough. Learned to double (or maybe triple) check the query for accuracy prior to running a Global Add (and definitely did for that Global Delete I had to do!).

Susan Leslie

@Crystal Bruce I feel better seeing others are making the same oppsies and me. My biggest is merging 2 records and deleting the source record at the same time but I missed transfering the gifts. So now I wait until after the transfer, double check the records, and then delete the old record. Thank goodness we do not have a lot of those anymore.

Rachel Kauer

@Crystal Bruce
Fortunately, this error was with a different software, but it taught me a big lesson which prepared me to work with a much bigger and more detailed Blackbaud database at my current org.

My old organization had just had a big donor breakfast the day before the end of the month and I had to enter about 300 donations before 5 pm so the business office could do their thing. I tried importing them for the first time to save time and accidentally created 300 duplicate individual and organizational records. One minute I was feeling accomplished the next I got an alert for 300 possible duplicates.? I think my soul nearly left my body!

Fortunately, customer service was able to undo the import for me and restore us from a backup while got my blood pressure back down to baseline... But I learned: When playing with imports start SMALL! Test a few records before mass changing, adding, or deleting data!

Angela Finley Hunter

@Rachel Kauer
Love your sense of humor! ?

Julie Bostick

@Crystal Bruce my oops was recent. Created a great email appeal and posted it for approval (with a partner vendor that sends the email for us) and then realized that the salutation that should have been “Dear donorname” was actually “Dear Julie". So 1,600 donors were about to be emailed a message address to me! Fortunately, I caught it in time and notified them and their IT team was able to delete it.

It was a nailbiter all day, though, as it was scheduled to go out at 9am the next morning!

As was said, double and triple check - and don't expect to catch critical details when it's late in the day and your brain is tired!

Liz Hackett

@Crystal Bruce

Interesting that merging duplicates has come up a few times in this thread, because that's one of my boo boos! Never change the % accuracy to 0….. ?

Also with emails…. TEST TEST TEST TEST TEST!! You can never do enough. When training new staff, I say this and they understand.

Jana Fross

@Crystal Bruce
I call these blunders “Rookie Mistakes”, and I've made a few through the years. Fortunately, never any permanent damage! (Somehow calling them that even after 25+ years in data management makes me feel human?!)

Most recently I merged a duplicate record and didn't include the gift history, so I lost the gift history of a major donor. I was relieved that she had fewer than a dozen gifts and I was able to recreate the entire history (to the penny!) using copies of TY letters, media files of her GIK, and balance to a recent lifetime giving history export. Whew…..

Irene Hui

@Vicky Lopuchowycz I do the same, too, especially when moving someone from the spouse tab out to the bio tab or vice versa! So many things to remember to switch - birthdates, nicknames, etc.

Rachel Cavalier

Inevitably once in a while, I will import something slightly wonky so I've learnt to let RE create a query from every import I do - it'll probably also come in handy for more than just fixing an oops (like importing constituents and having their preferred address be blank and the address I just imported them with be just an additional address!).

Related - I do a test of my import with maybe about 15 rows, because it's a lot easier to fix 15 things that are wrong than 200.

Faith Murray

@Crystal Bruce
This is a great thread idea! A couple learning moments I've made was back when we were self-hosted and I was still a bit green as a dbm. I accidentally imported a field to thousands of the wrong records, and there was no way to manually correct it because I had overwritten the existing data. Thankfully I had asked our IT team to back up before importing, and they were able to restore to the previous version. I worry a little about backup/restore limitations in cloud hosting on Azure because of that experience years ago.

Another incident that comes to mind was once when I deleted an old, inactive donor record with a gift on it. I hadn't realized at the time that if you are integrated with Financial Edge, you never, never delete a closed-year gift record! Thankfully I was able to re-create it because we keep our paper copies 7 years for our auditors. I learned to be very conscious of other software integration requirements whenever merging, deleting, or otherwise trimming donor records.

Erik Domingo

@Crystal Bruce A Luminate-based experience here (although I've run into the same situation with other platforms) - I still forget every once-in-a-rare-while to use the versioning feature of PageBuilders to create a new version when testing or editing. There have been countless times that having an earlier version has allowed us to rollback content causing problems very quickly. I now make it a point when training new LO Admins to stress using versions!

JoAnn Strommen

@Crystal Bruce Like many others have had blunders with merging, importing and last week while filling in for office mgr I sent a receipt to major donor for a split gift where RE failed me and did its glitch of putting wrong amount to wrong fund.

My biggest, which I hate to admit, was being in a hurry to unpost gifts and hit the ‘begin’ box without getting the query selected. Began unposting every gift. You get a warning when changing primary employer, you would think there would be a warning in red asking “Are you sure you want to do this stupid thing?”

Spring Velazquez

@Crystal Bruce in a galaxy long long ago and far far away, I got my first “tech” job at a local university. I was a Business Systems Analyst who supported our University Advancement system and everything was done on a unix platform.

I think maybe 3 weeks in, I was querying student records that were to be deleted, and rather than deleting the records in the query, I deleted the query with all the student records in it. Which means that yes, I deleted allllllll of the records in the student system.

I literally just blinked at the screen for what felt like hours but in reality was about 3 minutes. Then the phones started to ring. Then I started packing my desk and my heart was racing, but I knew it would be less humiliating to quit than to be fired ?

I also knew I had to tell my boss what I did before slinking out the back door. And her response gave me such a lesson in management that it stayed with me all these years later. First she said: of course I know what happened - I get alerts for large deletions, and I kind of wanted to see how long it would take you to tell me. Second she said: we are working for a university with its own IT department and we host our own software. We back-up every night and every morning, so at this point (it was literally 10:10 am) the rest of the users who were working on student records have only lost 2 hours and 7 minutes of data. I've already told IT to log out all users and restore from backup. Third she said: you will be the one to send an email to all users explaining they have to re-enter or re-do any changes made to the student records since 8:00 am. You don't have to tell them what happened or why, I'm not going to review your email, but you have to take some responsibility-what you say is your choice. And finally: There is nothing here that you can break permanently - ever. You might bend it a bit, but it won't break. Your recovery time always depend on your willingness to admit you made a mistake. 10 minutes is pretty good-but next time make it 5.

Her grace and the way she supported and protected me and allowed me to admit to and learn from my mistake without firing me has always helped me to think twice before losing my mind on myself, or my staff when big mistakes happen.

And I did send the email, and I admitted what I did, and added my own level of humor to it, so it made me some great friends throughout the university in the end.

In RE dbv the first thing I always taught staff was “WHEN IN DOUBT CANCEL OUT” so I'm going to have to find something else for NXT ?

Christine Robertson

@Crystal Bruce Many years ago in an early import, I sorted an Excel file incorrectly and accidentally added all of the gifts in the file to the wrong records. Thankfully, I found it quickly and could delete the gifts and re-import because I still had the original file (prior to the sort). Taught the importance of keeping the original file, reviewing everything as much as possible and using Excel functions with caution to maintain file integrity!!

Devan Bessinger

@Spring Velazquez Thank you for sharing this story. It's important to remember all of our own mistakes as we make our way up in the world and have teams reporting to us. Compassion is key, and so is remembering that nearly everything can be fixed! I had to remind someone the other day regarding processing some gifts from the mail… we aren't saving lives here. We'll do our best, and if it takes an extra day, so be it.

Bobby Steurer

@Crystal Bruce Like many other's experiences, I had just started my career and was learning RE. I attempted to get a little too fancy and ended up doing something funky with birthdays. I don't even remember the exact details. I just remember that my then-late 40's boss was suddenly 13 according to our records. I've been weirdly paranoid about age records ever since.

Ashlee Eda

@Crystal Bruce Imports: Incorrect spelling created new table entry.

I did a wealth screening and when we were importing the rating we checked “yes, update tables” so that it would create any new categories we did not have already created. Well we did not use spell check in Excel so it created a new table entry and "estimated" was spelled incorrectly when it came from the wealth screening company. Even though we had estimated capacity already in our table options since it was spelled incorrectly it created a new entry.? Now, I have to do a global update to change this for the thousands of records. Just was fearful of messing something else up so I have not done it yet. Hope this helps someone else!

Advice. Check spelling. Add the table entry first and do not select “create new table entries”.