New perspectives in data collection and retention – Part Two

In Part One we looked at two reasons why you need to take a critical look at your current data collection processes.

1. You owe it to your volunteers to ensure you are using up to date best practises in managing information about them.
2. Trends suggest that this is going to be legislated so you might as well get started.

In this, Part Two, of the series we’re going to look at some common pieces of information that are collected about volunteers and how you might want to reconsider your approach to their collection, retention and deletion. There isn’t room to fully explore a variety of examples but hopefully it will give you enough of an idea of what to consider in your own organization.

Emergency Contact Information

• Collect - This appears on many volunteer application forms but based on the principal of collecting data only at the point at which we need it, it should not. Some volunteers never make it through the intake process and as such, this is holding personal data unnecessarily. A better time to collect this is when they are actually accepted as a volunteer.
• Verify – If you currently record emergency contact information for your volunteers, when was the last time your volunteers reviewed it? There is no point holding on to inaccurate data.
• Delete – There are reasons to hold on to some volunteer information after they are no longer a volunteer, but given that you’ll never need to reach out to an emergency contact, this should be deleted at this stage.

T-shirt size

• Collect - Ask only when the volunteer has become accepted. (Could this ever be interpreted as an application form question that could be used as a basis for discrimination.)
• Delete - Once you hand over the T-shirt.

References

• Collect - Ask only when you get to the stage where you would like to contact references.
• Delete - As soon as you reach the point where you will never have to refer to them again.

While you might think it may take too much time to keep up with this, any good volunteer management software should help make this easy, especially compared  with Excel or paper. So ask about this when exploring new software options.

If you have any questions about this, feel free to email me at tony@betterimpact.ca or come to the LIVE conference in Ottawa and my session on this very topic.