The organizations we work with are usually struggling with two challenges at the same time, although they don't always recognize that they're connected.

The first challenge is a strategic plan that no longer guides day-to-day decisions. Yes, the board approved the plan, staff keep it in a shared file, and they draw on it for grant proposals. But over time, it has faded into the background. Today, if we ask staff about the organization's priorities, we hear different answers—all of which may make sense, but few of which still align with the plan.

The second challenge lives in the technology stack, most notably in the CRM. Most organizations—even our own company—have accumulated a collection of data systems over time, many of which are now dormant (or worse, we still pay for but don’t use). This may have happened because a donor requested a special report, a board member wanted to see data through the lens of a new set of metrics, or a new finance director renamed fund codes. Each decision seemed reasonable at the time, but now nobody is quite sure how everything fits together, and even answering simple questions requires significant effort.

Most organizations treat strategic and data challenges as separate issues. Data managers and fundraisers often see strategic planning as a leadership responsibility. Leadership may see data management as something that belongs only to operations, finance, or development staff.

However, when either area becomes disorganized, it affects the other. Without understanding the work of the other (or in many organizations, not even knowing each other), strategy and data can pull an organization apart. When an organization loses discipline around its goals and objectives, that lack of clarity eventually shows up in its systems and data. And when data systems become fragmented or difficult to trust, measuring progress and making sound decisions becomes much harder.

While the symptoms vary from one organization to another, the root causes usually stem from three areas of drift: governance, internal leadership, and fundraising data and operations.

Governance Drift

Governance drift starts in the board room. For example, a board approves a strategic plan in Year 1. By Year 3, four initiatives are running that were not in the plan, although each has been approved through a reasonable-seeming decision. Or, a committee forms to address an urgent issue, the issue resolves, and the committee keeps meeting, generating its own agenda items and budget requests.

Although the plan technically still exists, it has stopped helping the board govern.

In our experience, this usually happens gradually. The strategic plan gets discussed during the retreat and then receives little attention until the next one. New opportunities arise, and because they seem worthwhile, leaders move forward without considering how they fit into existing priorities. Organizations add programs, committees, and activities far more readily than they eliminate them. Over time, nobody is really responsible for asking whether the organization's work still aligns with the strategy it adopted.

Internal Leadership Drift

Leadership drift occurs in the day-to-day decisions senior leaders make while trying to solve legitimate problems.

For example, a development team may decide it needs more information about its donors, so someone expands the donor visit report template and soon it captures food preferences, dietary restrictions, conversation topics, and dozens of other details. Completing one report takes forty-five minutes, and very little of the information is ever used.

Similarly, a leadership team may want better information about lapsed donors. To address the issue, someone creates a spreadsheet outside the CRM. The spreadsheet solves an immediate problem, but a year later, staff are looking at two different reports and trying to determine which one is correct.

Or consider a development department that wants to track fundraising activity more precisely. Staff create campaign codes for every possible funding scenario. By year-end, many of those codes contain little or no activity, yet staff still have to maintain them and work around them.

In each case, the decision made sense at the time. The problem is not the individual decision but what happens when dozens of similar decisions accumulate over several years. 

Organizations add reports, fields, spreadsheets, dashboards, and codes far more readily than they remove them. Without clear standards for what belongs in the system and what does not, complexity grows steadily until staff spend more time managing processes than using them to advance the mission.

Fundraising Data and Operations Drift

The third area is fundraising data and operations.

By the time issues show up here, they have usually been building for years. This is where all of those decisions—large and small—start to add up.

For example, a donor passes away, but the record remains active. His wife continues receiving appeals addressed to both of them. After several years, she calls and asks that the mailings stop. Unfortunately, that conversation is often the organization's last interaction with her.

Or consider an organization with 200 fund codes in its chart of accounts. More than sixty are inactive. Some are duplicates from an old system migration. Others refer to programs that no longer exist. Staff spend extra time running reports, reconciling accounts, and trying to determine which information they should trust.

Organizations often describe these situations as technology problems, but in most cases, the technology is simply reflecting years of decisions that were never revisited. New reports were added. New codes were created. Exceptions were made. Workarounds became permanent. Over time, the systems became harder to manage, and the data became less useful. That is why a platform migration alone rarely solves the problem.

Three Questions to Take Back to Your Team

At the beginning of this article, we suggested that strategic planning challenges and data challenges are often connected, even though organizations tend to treat them as separate issues. By now, that connection should be easier to see.

When a strategic plan stops guiding decisions, priorities begin to multiply. As priorities multiply, staff create new reports, dashboards, codes, and workarounds to support them. Over time, systems become more complicated, data becomes harder to trust, and leadership loses visibility into what is actually happening across the organization.

For teams working in Blackbaud platforms, here are three questions worth discussing this week.

Can every active dashboard be connected to a current strategic priority? If not, who has the authority to retire it? Dashboards that no longer serve a purpose gradually erode confidence in reporting.

Do your KPI definitions reflect decisions your current leadership team has made, or are they holdovers from an implementation completed years ago? If you are not sure, that uncertainty tells you something important.

When a new staff member enters a donor record, does the system guide that person toward consistent practices, or does it leave room for interpretation? The answer often predicts what your data will look like five years from now.

The governance conversation and the data conversation need to happen in the same room, with the same people, and on the same schedule. Strategic discipline and data discipline support one another. Organizations that pay attention to both are far more likely to stay focused on their priorities, make better decisions, and use their strategic plans as the management tools they were intended to be.

Sophia Shaw is co-founder of PlanPerfect, former president and CEO of the Chicago Botanic Garden, and a nonprofit leader, consultant, and educator with four decades in the social sector.

Adam Wolford is co-founder of PlanPerfect, with more than a decade in technology development, strategy, and operations. He served as head of product for the endurance industry's leading technology platform and is a trustee of the Intuit Art Museum.