From late September until mid-April, one of the most frequently asked questions is “Is-all-of the-data-entered-yet?”. It is such an endearing question.
Is it in DonorPerfect? Is it in Quickbooks? Is the gala auction balanced? Is our CRM data clean (the most dreaded question of all). Before marketing and before those lovely souls in donor development get giddy about Big Data, before the financial year is closed, before you even know for sure how many program participants accessed how many levels of service, there’s the big, time-sucking task that no one likes to talk about: Data Entry.
Don’t diss data entry.
You’ve heard the saying “garbage in, garbage out” and it certainly applies here. With data coming from so many different resources it’s hard to keep it clean—and by clean I mean standardized, usable and reliable. It’s also very easy to assign the task of entering (and quality review) to someone who seems to have “spare time”. In today’s economy, however, I don’t see many employees who have “spare time”. “No time” seems more appropriate, especially in the nonprofit sector.
Fortunately, there is PNP, specializing in providing temps who not only understand the caffeine laced question, but understand the CRM and financial software most commonly used by nonprofits. These workers play an important role in not only data entry, but year-end prep, 990 reporting, budgeting and consultation.
Let’s not be fooled by the word temp. Today, temporary labor includes highly-skilled workers from almost every industry and talent sector. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of workers employed in temp positions has climbed to a new high—2.87 million. In 2015, the temporary labor market was projected to grow 7%. We don’t know what the final number is yet, but I’m sure someone is asking “is-all-of-the data- entered yet?”.
The temporary hiring solution might actually be just the thing to solve your end-of-year, first-of-year time crunch — before the data issue becomes a problem. Add that to today’s tasks.