Hi Everyone,
Really glad this group now exists. I'm part of the Philadelphia Regional Arts Consortium of about 18 organizations up and down the east coast USA. We have a set of data standards for how our information is entered to keep things consistent across the board. We have very thorough documentation on this as well but it can be dense and I'm wondering how anyone is handling the training side of this to make it more interesting and fun. I'm charged with training most middle to upper management folks at organizations, or to "train the trainer" but would love to come up with some way to get this information across is a way that's a little easier to digest and more interesting.
Any suggestions welcomed!
-Maureen Cotellese
I second Heath's idea of an Easter Egg Hunt (and LOVE the Harry Potter idea!!). We set up dummy constituents with quirky names in Test and use them for a quick quiz where people need to find the answers and/or errors by poking about in the records.
And if there are 2 or more people, I get them to work in pairs or threes and give each person a little card with fake customer details (name, contact details, constituencies etc.). Have one person start as the 'assistant' and the other as the 'customer' and then swap roles; essentially a 'role play' although I never use those dreaded words...!
The assistant should create a record in Test by asking the customer questions to get the data they need (related to the points you're focusing on in the current session). Eg.:
You can make it fairly simple to practice the basics OR get complicated and have them returning 'later' to update addresses, creating second records with relationships etc.
And you might want to throw in some red herrings on the customer side to see if they spot your trickery. For example, the customer might say 'oh, I've got a Narnia ID' which may be something customers mention all the time but isn't actually something your org offers a discount for / notes on records. How do they deal with this?
Even if you're working with a group who don't deal with customers directly, I think it's still a useful hands-on exercise that gets people helping each other and thinking about how / why the data ends up there in the first place!