Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Call Me By My True Names: The Collected Poems, Parallax Press, August 9, 2001
I’m sure they still make them in some form, but do you remember being on vacation as a kid and seeing the whole rack of personalized tchotchkes? Especially license plates from whatever state you were visiting? There was never a “Clay.” And I looked every single time.
Dale Carnegie said it best, “Remember that a person's name is to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Get somebody’s name wrong and, boy, you’ve got a lot of recovery to do. You might have the best pitch, the best story, the most incredible product, but use somebody’s name wrong, and you’ve lost any credibility you had.
Clay isn’t a hard name. And it’s not THAT unusual, but you’d be surprised at the permutations I get – Clark, Craig, Chris, Clag . . . yes, somebody called me Clag. Because Clag is in much more common parlance than Clay. I’m still upset about that one.
Marketing, sales, and my field fundraising are really about persuasion. It’s about talking to people about their values, their identity, who they are, and encouraging—asking them—to make a commitment to something that really fits their identity as a human. It may be a product, or it may be, again in fundraising, a life-saving, world-changing mission.
But to truly get to people’s values . . . to their own personal brand . . . we have to appeal to them as a person. And if we get their name wrong, we have invalidated their identity right from the outset.
It’s why I’m passionate about data.
Data is the single greatest asset any nonprofit—well, ANY organization—can have. Our donors and our customers are everything. Without them, we don’t exist. And if we can’t reach them and engage them in dialogue, conversation, and messaging, we become, as Shakespeare wrote, “Full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” And all contact begins with data:
Name fields
Address information
Email address
Phone number
Spouse name
The quality of the data we have and use has, in my experience, the greatest impact on our ability to reach and engage with people. Our donors. Our customers.
And yet the management and maintenance—indeed, the prioritization of data quality—is often hefted off or outsourced, and we don’t pay that close attention to it. Because it’s a numbers game sometimes, isn’t it? We’re not terribly worried (too much) if our email didn’t reach all intended recipients or the mail piece didn’t reach the intended homes, because we got other responses.
But somewhere in that big file of data was a Clay looking for his name on a license plate. And we called him Crag. And he thought, “You don’t know me at all.” Our audiences are begging us to call them by their true names. To show them we know them and that they’re valuable to us – and we’re valuable to them. The value of clean data cannot be over or underestimated.
T. Clay Buck, CFRE is the chief development officer at Nevada Blind Children’s Foundation. You can find him online at @TClayBuck or tcbfundraising.com.