3 ms·
My basic role is analysis and database marketing for a non-profit foundation. I was hired into a new position for them a little over three years ago into a role
by Declanomous 9y ago
My basic role is analysis and database marketing for a non-profit foundation. I was hired into a new position for them a little over three years ago into a role that was an amalgamation of a bunch of roles from people who had left. They unified these roles into a single role, and split the unrelated work between other people in the organization.
I set the strategy for all of our mailings, run the data, and then analyze the performance. We have 800,000 constituents, and send about 500,000 appeal letters each year, as well as countless emails and other pieces of mail. I've managed to decrease our cost to raise a dollar from about 22 cents to about 6 cents, while improving the overall quality of our appeals, which I'm pretty proud of.
We are a really small organization (<50 employees), so I end up doing a really wide variety of tasks. We have a lot of challenges that larger organizations wouldn't have because of our limited manpower.
Since nobody had really taken a holistic look at their data before me, I spent the first year cleaning up all of their existing data and automating almost every processes I could get my hands on. I used to spend 3 weeks of every month running recurring processes, and I cut that down to about 15 minutes a week.
After that first year my manager left. At this time the Director asked me to come work directly under him because he felt that none of the other managers understood my role well enough to manage me. This allowed me to focus more on the analysis and marketing side of my role.
As time has gone on I've been asked to create more processes for speeding up other people's work. I'm not an application designer, and I recognize that the processes I'm creating are pretty fragile. This wasn't a problem when I was automating my own processes, because if they broke I could fix them. Now there are a bunch of people using processes that only I can fix, which makes it very hard to take a vacation or a sick day. This causes me a lot of stress, which is a key reason why my walks have been trending longer.
I'm basically somewhere in the middle of the graph from the XKCD comic Automation[1]. I'm starting to look for a new job before fixing broken automation steals the time I need to make a resume (or do the part of my job I really enjoy).
So long story short, I basically do anything involving the data or programming for a small-to-mid-size non-profit organization.
[1] https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/