Improving your data integrity

Printer friendly: Article as PDF (181 KB)

There are over 11,400,000 search results for data integrity from Google - however how many organisations are practicing good data integrity principles? Data integrity is defined as data that has a complete or whole structure.

Marketing or fundraisers come face-to-face with data integrity issues when their communication campaigns are prepared. They will almost certainly complain about the quality of the data they have on the organisations customers, members or donors. They may have duplicates, incomplete addresses, names or general data errors. Communicating to your customers with this poor data will affect your reputation, brand and ultimately the bottom line.

The other affect that poor data integrity can have is the ability to report on your business operations. Financial and purchase transactions data are only as accurate as the data entry. The marketing campaign that was held for end of financial year may not be accurately reported if there are errors in how these transactions are being recorded.

Here are some tips for improving your data integrity strategies.

1. Data integrity champion

You must allocate a business owner for data integrity, they are the champion and advocate the benefits of clean and accurate data. Apart from your staff, data is your number one asset - so manage it with a resource.

Continue ...