Field Notes
A publication, not a blog
No schedule, no content calendar. Field Notes exists to prove competence over time: real numbers, real work, the unglamorous parts included. Every piece is signed by its actual author.
Spreadsheets
Why is this spreadsheet so heavy?
Eighty rows of data, 10.2 megabytes of file. Where the invisible weight comes from, how to find it, and how to take it off in about five minutes.
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Reporting
Nobody on the board reads row 47
One good chart does more work than a page of numbers. Here’s what that looks like in a board packet or a grant application.
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Prospect research
I ran a wealth screening on myself. It found someone else.
A donor prospect screening said I was an executive with a seven-figure income and a seat on multiple foundation boards. It had found a different person with my name.
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Case study
You can’t clean your way out of a bad form
A nonprofit hired us to clean up their registration data. A day in, it was obvious we’d been hired to fix the wrong thing.
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Donor CRM
Nobody chose your CRM
Somebody picked it during a grant cycle years ago and then left. Here’s how to work out whether it still fits, and why the answer is usually cheaper than switching.
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Data quality
Your list is shorter than you think
Rob and Robert are the same man. Janelle Graves and Janelle McDaniels are the same woman. You are paying to store both of them.
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Employee giving
The check that doesn’t say who it’s from
A deposit lands from a company nobody at your organization has ever heard of. It is forty of your donors, and you are about to thank none of them.
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Case study · HR
Thousands of rows of benefits data, and a dashboard
A payroll export holds the ingredients, not the answers. Closing that gap is most of what this work actually is.
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Spreadsheets
Fostering more than one animal? It’s also a data problem
Five foster cats, five medication schedules, and one six-tab spreadsheet. The way it’s organized is the part worth stealing.
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Elsewhere
The curator also keeps a museum. The Museum of Regrettable Spreadsheets is a permanent collection of spreadsheets that should not exist, and it is accepting donations.