Jane Katzman is a non-profit professional who operates differently. She was hired as the associate director of Cornelian because of her ability to connect with people and humanize the issues the organization promotes. While recognized as top talent in her field, there just weren’t enough hours in the day for her to put out all the fires and still have serious impact. Organizational success matters a lot to Jane, and she was having trouble deciding which of the dozens of customer, donor, and employee issues and feedback to prioritize with her limited time. For this reason, she looked to incorporate data driven decision making into how her organization is run. While having no aspirations to be a statistician, she wanted tools to evaluate which initiatives have the most merit, and which issues are the most pressing. It’s because of her, and professionals like her, that we have been doing more work to train professionals in how to make data driven decisions on their own, through a series of workshops enitled 7 steps for data-driven decision making. The crux of these workshops is giving professionals the tools to make them thoughtful evaluators and consumers of numerical thinking in their everyday work.

The 7 steps method is very straightforward: problem framing, hypothesis development, data collection, data analysis, interpretation, decision making and communication. The best practice tactics for each step were developed by learning from our clients on what works best for them. For example, here are a few key questions to ask yourself about decisions you are currently considering in your organization:

• What measurable proof do we currently have that this problem exists? Before entering a deeper conversation about the causes and importance of an issue, we need to know if we can measure it.

• What does the data say as to whether the problem is an issue that demands our limited time and resources? A lot of anecdotes does not constitute good data since it is rarely representative (we tend to get anecdotes only from people we are very close to, which is a self-selecting group). Remember, 80% of the anecdotes asserted by leadership are not supported by the data.

• Are there external benchmarks from other organizations available to give me a compass in this area? It’s important to have access to a third party lens, in order to know if a problem is truly significant. A non-profit may have seen a 10% dip in charitable donations in 2008. Is this a crisis or holding steady in a bad economy? Instead of sitting in a board meeting relying on intuition or feeling, it is helpful to know that across the board, there was a 6% dip in charitable giving in 2008 (Giving USA). This allows the conversation to skip conjecture and provides the lens by which we can start to evaluate this problem objectively.

Last year, the board and management team at Jane’s school, Cornelian Academy, was confident their elementary school division was financially viable, but that the rest of their divisions were not. Initially, Jane was asked to hire a firm to create a strategic plan to ensure the rest of their divisions function more like their elementary school. After speaking to Measuring Success, Jane decided to build her own skills through our 7 steps for data-driven decision making training. With our support, Jane gained the skills to dig deeper through financial analysis and activity based costing. It became apparent from the data that Cornelian’s elementary school was actually where they were most vulnerable – both financially and in likelihood to lose families. The board and management team were initially shocked. When Jane asked how they arrived at their initial conclusion, they said “that was our strategy when we started the school, we never did this analysis, and as a result we still held those assumptions.” A few months later, Jane used a Measuring Success tool to conduct a survey of her customers, and it turned out that 80% of the board and management team’s assumptions about where they excelled were not supported by the data either. Jane recognized the key to data driven decision making is frequency – it cannot be an activity undertaken once every 5 years during a strategic planning initiative with an outside consultant – Jane’s commitment is to make it a mindset that she owns and ensures it pervades every management team and board meeting.

Remember, being data driven is about changing your culture and building new skill sets. To learn more about this and other ways to become a data-driven organization, please contact me at newsletter@measuring-success.com

(* Client names changed for this article)