The Age of Love

Inspiration for this blog post - Some recent blog post titles I’ve seen:

The Time Is Now for Nonprofit Workflow Automation

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Cozy Up with a Good Book

Organize your workspace

There is more to data & technology for mission-driven work than just clicking buttons. There are the technical parts, of course. It is great to know a litany of spreadsheet formulas, to be able to speak fluent Python, to have memorized API endpoints or all of the keyboard shortcuts across any operating system. But anyone who has tried to just memorize the correct syntax for an xlookup formula without understanding what it is meant to do and how it can be useful will tell you that you’ll end up hitting a lot of errors and not totally getting why.

There is something else to this data & technology work that isn’t always as easily put into a blog post or a how-to video. It is more holistic. It is more spiritual. It is more human.

To have a really positive data & technology culture at a nonprofit, there needs to be support for ongoing professional development so staff members always have the chance to LEARN about their data & tech. There needs to be support for staff members to USE their data & technology - which means there also needs to be support and care when (not if) mistakes are made. And then there is the toughest cookie - there needs to be cultivation of LOVE. What does it mean to love your data & technology? That is going to be answered differently for different people, organizations, situations, etc - although there is a short-to-medium list of signs of positive relationship with technology that seem to be fairly common.

We are in the Age of Love for data & technology. In fact, we need to be in the age of love for everything - humanity, the environment, technology - otherwise what really is the point of doing all this? In April we are setting aside a day dedicated to Learning, Using, and Loving our data & technology for mission-driven work. I hope you’ll join us!