NUCLEUS ANALYTICS BLOG

Our product team has been exceptionally busy with Nucleus development, and a host of new features just landed! We’re excited to share these updates because they’ll be immediately useful for your organization.

Those of you who attended the ASAE Technology conference may have heard Theresa Payton's keynote address, which mentioned Quantum Computing. I've been following the evolution of Quantum Computing for several years and believe in its transformative potential, so I’m excited to see it discussed in the association community! 

Knowing what your association members think, want, and need is paramount in connecting with them about your offerings. But unless you’re listening attentively to their every comment on community boards, social media, in article commentary, and on product reviews, you’re going to miss key metrics about how engaged they are. Analyzing overall sentiment through automated text analysis helps you quickly understand how engaged your members are and how they’re feeling about your organization, products, or services.

Nucleus clients have surfaced key analytics they want to share with the broader community, whether it be on their public-facing web site, or for their members. The Nucleus product team identified this use case early on, and has responded to client’s needs by developing new features and functionality to support them.

We are firm believers that democratizing data leads to better organizational effectiveness. But occasionally, a need arises where you must provide specific views into your data. With our new role-based access feature, you can now personalize your users’ Nucleus experience.

Our Nucleus product team has been working hard to optimize the insights you can gain about your donations and donors to help you to better analyze, anticipate, and improve your organization’s fundraising efforts.

Data analytics platforms often boast the same generic capabilities: all of them are easy to use, the visualizations are both beautiful and actionable, and you'll glean insights that you couldn't have found elsewhere. Unless you have deep knowledge or selection experience, it’s easy to take bold claims at face value. So how can you – without being a data expert – accurately compare platform against platform?

We’ve heard a lot about the high rate of unsuccessful data initiatives. According to Gartner, an astounding 70 to 80 percent of business intelligence (BI) projects have failed. 

A failure rate that high prompts us to ask the big questions: why? If everyone is trying to leverage data to make better decisions, then why is it so hard to glean actionable insights? How can these initiatives be more successful?

It’s natural for organizations to think about BI success exclusively in terms of outcomes, because after all, improving the bottom line enables advancement of the organization’s mission.

For example, we often see organizations determining whether a BI project was successful by monitoring for increases in member engagement, conference attendance, or renewal rates. While these metrics are crucial, they don’t account for how an organization plans to achieve them. Simply implementing a BI initiative or setting goals doesn’t address the roadmap for achieving real results.

Creating a data governance strategy used to be a standard process, but evolving technology and agile methodology have enabled new and different approaches. Before you begin defining your data governance needs, consider your organization’s culture, timeline, and budget and whether an agile or traditional methodology would suit your needs best. The good news is, regardless of which path you choose, it’s easier than ever to create a strategy that’s both affordable and easy to adopt.