Data Transparency–The Secret to Unlocking Your Team's Potential

Leading a team isn’t easy–there are always hurdles to overcome and more goals to meet.

It’s even more challenging when your team is small and you’re in the reactive environments nonprofit leaders sometimes (ok fine, often) find themselves in.

So here's the million dollar question: how do you make the most of the sometimes lean team that you have?

The answer: data transparency. By making information available across your organization rather than housing it in siloes, you enable your organization to collaborate more effectively.

When all your data lives in the same ecosystem, the access to information becomes a game changer

Let’s start by looking at a specific situation where data transparency can be beneficial.

It’s the week of your financial committee board meeting and you’ve tasked your bookkeeper with preparing the documents for the meeting. Because you have set up their permissions in MonkeyPod transparently and thoughtfully, your bookkeeper can run the reports themselves and prepare for the meeting.

Because your bookkeeper can work independently, there’s no going back and forth, no waiting to proofread and edit. That means precious time is saved for everyone. Simply running financial reports and attaching them to the meeting invite is seamless.

The first benefit here is obvious: it’s a big time saver. Where you were once a bottleneck for the organization, you have instead removed yourself, allowing everyone to work more efficiently. Your bookkeeper is able to run the reports they need to without spending hours tallying information in disparate places or constantly coming to you with questions or requests for information.

But there’s also a secondary benefit. Because your bookkeeper is empowered and trusted to prepare the information themselves, they feel more accountability and ownership of those monthly reports. They can more easily see the direct impact they are making on your organization and can take ownership of the organization's success.

Data transparency leads to continuity within your team.

When you work on a small team, it can be really difficult to step away from the work. Every decision and detail seems urgently important, and if you’re the only person with access to certain information, it can feel impossible to even take a long week, let alone a week long vacation.

You care about your team, so you don’t want them to feel that pressure, intentionally or unintentionally. It can also be a drain on your overall productivity. Hunter Selection, a UK-based recruitment service, notes that “Employees who feel they have a good work-life balance are 21% more productive than those who don't, according to a recent survey.” ¹

Curating an environment where work-life balance is optimal can be challenging, but again, transparency can help overcome that challenge. Let’s look at an example.

Your development team is in the middle of a big push to bring in more grant funding for the organization. As part of their annual goal, they need to apply for 5 new grants. This feels like a daunting task for them, but it’s a problem we aimed to solve when we built MonkeyPod.

Our Grant Tracker app is specifically designed for this situation. Rather than having all the information about your grant proposals saved on one person’s desktop, they can be tracked in the Grant Tracker. From there, everyone can see past efforts and the required components, no matter who worked on the proposal.

It also helps improve your grant writing efforts because you can see a breakdown of how many grants were awarded and by whom. Your team may even be able to repurpose past submission components like letters of intent or budgets for future grants without having to send a bunch of emails searching for a document. That’s even more time saved.

In this example, it is important to note that transparency amongst the development team has the ability to ease the mental load on each individual while achieving the team’s goal. Because the information within the system is not gate kept, all team members can see the progress and assign tasks to each other. Everyone is on the same page.

It is worth noting that while transparency has its benefits, there are certain scenarios that call for differing levels of information for your teams. Not everyone on your team needs access to payroll details, for example. But what I want to stress is that transparency should be the default, and information siloes should be the exception.

The key takeaway

For your organization to achieve its goals, you can’t let a lock of information be a blocker. Whether you use the tools within MonkeyPod or not, it is important to create a methodology that values transparency of information and creates a way for everyone to get what they need to do their job efficiently.

The more you can enable opportunities for teams to share data and enable self-service access, the better. It empowers your team to take more accountability and ownership, and can lead to a healthier work-life balance. Consider evaluating your organization’s operations to see how you can be more transparent.

And if you’re looking for tools that enable greater collaboration at your nonprofit, our team would love to chat with you.

1. Work-Life Balance: A Key Factor in Job Satisfaction