We had to take a tough break from blogging for a little while. We lost one of the Buck-White Boys on February 15. The original Buck-White Boy, the lab by which all others will be measured and the Dog That Started It All. Tucker.
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Tucker was the best. He was the best part of a Pet Partners Animal Assisted Therapy team. One of the sweetest, kindest, most joyful animals you would ever want to know and he took a huge part of our hearts with him.
On his therapy visits, Tucker didn’t do well sitting still – he did better in situations where he could go from room to room and visit with people. He’d turn a corner and walk into a hospital room, where someone would be desperately ill, and the whole room would just light up. He’d smile and wag and soon everybody was smiling and wagging.
He just wanted people to be happy.
That’s labs, man. They just want everyone to be happy.
Now, I’m not going to anthropomorphize data so much that I’m going to compare it to a therapy dog, but . . . your data pretty much just wants you to be happy.
Data doesn’t want to be difficult, it doesn’t want to be messy and complicated and tough to deal with. It just wants you to be happy.
Your fundraising data is the single greatest tool you have – well, other than your rock star personality, amazing charm, superior intellect and dashingly good looks. Without good data, all of that goes to waste because, without information, who are you sharing all of that awesomeness with?
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Clean, structured, secure data makes your job 1,000 times easier. If you don’t have to worry about your data, you can spend your time loving on donors.
That’s what I mean by your data wants you to be happy – it wants you out there changing the world, not sitting in the office crunching data sets or cleaning up salutations.
We were fortunate to get Tucker as a nine-week-old puppy and we invested a lot in his training and development.
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The older he got, the fewer bad habits he had and we could always revert back to that training to remind him what good behavior was. He ultimately passed the AKC’s Canine Good Citizens Test.
Invest in training your data, keeping it clean and up-to-date and don’t let the bad habits accumulate – that’s a happy database. And a happy database = a happy and successful fundraiser.
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