Donor Data and Why "It" Matters (Tues)

Yesterday most of my focus was on data collection in relation to donor information. Essentially I was looking at donor trends, analyzing spreadsheets of donors for both the 2014 election, and the 2012 election. The purpose of this was to get a better idea of who donates, when they donated, and if they've donated so far to the 2014 campaign and if so how recently. On top of analyzing the data, and provided my own conclusions that I could draw from what I was reading, I was doing a lot of data compression. This basically meant that I was looking for sets of matching names in the data I received, so someone who donated on multiple occasions either to the 2012 campaign, to the 2014 campaign, or both. I would remove the remaining names so that I could isolate only the people who have donated on multiple occasions, therefore collecting a group of donors who have the highest likeliness to continue to donate.

Now the practice of deleting names on a spreadsheet doesn't seem that difficult, and I'll admit that the individual action of doing so isn't that hard. But like anything, it's important to put things into context. There were over three thousand names on that list, so going through and sorting them was no easy task. But more importantly, the end result of compressing this list matters. It's not some random in-class assignment I'm completing in my last block on a Tuesday afternoon, where a few little mistakes aren't really going to amount to anything. This is something that will actually be used, data that is important to the campaign, numbers that will be referenced in the future.

So I guess for me it doesn't really matter the size or weight of the task assigned to me, everything matters, and so I work diligently to ensure my end result is a representation of that realization.