Fundraising on a Wing and a Prayer: Why Your Data Silos Are Costing You
19th September 2025 by Deniz Hassan
We live in a sector awash with dashboards, reports, and metrics, so much so that it’s easy to assume everything is working as it should. But scratch the surface and you’ll often find something much less reassuring: fundraising programmes built on sand, behind smoke and mirrors.
This isn’t simply a question of individual skill. It’s the inevitable by-product of outdated structures and a chronic disconnect between fundraisers and analysts.
A Cautionary Tale: The Big Appeal That Wasn’t
Let me share a story that should give any charity leader pause.
A couple of years ago, a client celebrated a record-breaking appeal. Dashboards told a glowing story - targets smashed, performance off the charts. The results went all the way up the chain. There were congratulatory emails, back-slapping, even budget reallocations in anticipation of the same success next time.
Fast-forward a year. As part of planning for the next big push, someone spotted a few anomalies. What looked like minor inconsistencies turned out to be massive mistakes in the data transformation, buried miles upstream from the final reports.
Nobody had the full context of the entire data flow until I sat down with a data engineer and unpicked the lot. The bottom line? Income had been overstated by a huge amount. What was assumed to be a winning formula was, in fact, a dangerous illusion.
The Thin Sliver of Understanding
The truth is, the overlap between fundraisers who deeply understand data, and analysts who deeply understand fundraising, is wafer thin.
This isn’t about incompetence. It’s about structural silos:
Analysts don’t always know what they’re analysing or why it matters.
Fundraisers often don’t know how their data is assembled or what it actually represents.
When you operate like this, you’re effectively running your fundraising programme on blind trust and luck.
Dashboards Full of Nonsense
We’ve normalised living in a world of reports that look solid but aren’t:
Metrics with no real meaning.
Models built in a vacuum.
Dashboards that serve more as décor than decision-making tools.
This is how bad decisions happen, and why so many strategies fail to deliver.
The Fix: Build the Middle of the Venn Diagram
Here’s what needs to change. It isn’t complicated, but it does require commitment:
Fundraisers: stop blindly trusting reports.
If you don’t understand how your data is put together, you’re working on a wing and a prayer. Get curious. Ask questions. Demand clarity.Analysts: stop building models in isolation.
Step out of the technical bubble. Learn what drives fundraising decisions. Engage with the people using your reports.Leaders: break the silos.
Invest in structures and skills that encourage collaboration and mutual understanding. Make it someone’s job to connect the dots.
If we can do this, that thin sliver in the Venn diagram, where fundraisers and analysts truly understand each other’s worlds, will finally get bigger. And with it, so will the impact and income our organisations can achieve.
Final Thought
Until we move beyond outdated structures and start valuing shared understanding, the sector will continue to haemorrhage time, money, and opportunity.
It’s time to build fundraising programmes on solid ground, not wishful thinking. Because no cause deserves to be propped up by bad data and blind faith.