Public Resource
Automating the hard stuff (and impress your organizers along the way)
Brittany Bennett, Sunrise Movement

In this blog post from January 2021, Brittany Bennett, the Data Director for Sunrise Movement, argues that in order to become a data-driven organization, the people in charge of the data and data management need to be oriented towards serving the organizers as their first priority. "[W]when you cannot deliver accurate results quick to organizers, you lose their buy in to your system. And when your organizers do not use your systems, your organizations becomes less data driven."

In the post, Ms. Bennett builds her point around the pre-CRM migration use of Google Form + Sheets by Sunrise organizers. She takes pains to show how much work her team had to go through in order to deliver basic functionality that Google Forms provide with no learning curve - but with the benefit of being synced with Sunrise's data warehouse, and therefore moving the entire organization down the pathway of becoming as data-driven as possible. Ultimately her point is that a core function of a data team is to serve the organizers, rather than to build an amazing data warehouse. Without delivering what organizers want in a timely fashion, then they won't use the systems, and the entire process falls apart and the ability of the organization to increase its efficacy degrades significantly.