Why data quality programmes are important for advancement

Abstract

The explosion in fundraising and alumni relations for data-derived decision making and analytics requires an investment in data quality. There are often complaints from professionals about the quality of data in databases. The data is not up to date or correct. Support staff members feel they can never keep up with the never-ending requirement for more data. Vendor systems deal with the common data and have difficulty in keeping up with advances in what advancement professionals are asking systems to capture. This leads to clashes in philosophy and culture. Senior leadership sometimes thinks ‘this can be solved with a new system’. All systems have faults in their operation, but inherent in all of this is the quality of the data within the system. This paper identifies best practices around data quality that need to be considered as university leadership becomes more dependent on fundraising and alumni engagement for support.