I was at a function a few days ago and someone was there promoting their organisation. It was a great organisation I must say, and at the end of the night, the person passed around a paper for us to fill in if we were interested to be kept up-to-date with all the cool stuff the organisation is doing.

After my first glance at the paper, my enthusiasm immediately died down by 20%. There were 5 columns – First Name, Last Name, Mobile, Address and Email Address.

I know that there used to be a perception that the more details you get from someone, the more you can keep that person in because you can easily hunt them down. However, those are red tapes that first put people off.

We’re moving towards a 140 characters world, where every character counts and if you don’t need those information, don’t ask for it. Looking through your database, do you see any information of your stakeholders that you’ve never used? Such as address – what do you do with them? Those extra information, although comes in handy when you need it, but the chances of you needing them is not worth wasting your computer’s space, administration managing the database and the person filling in all these information that you don’t need.

It’s easy to be sucked into thinking that the more, the better but in a world where resources are limited, you want to be efficient and straight to the point. Managing extra things that will give you limited outcomes is only a waste of time and resources. In a non-profit settings, you cannot afford to waste any of those. As far as thinking ahead goes, its about narrowing it down to the niche and efficiency.

That also applies to organisation managing social media. A lot of time, organisation jumps on the bandwagon because everyone’s on it, but if social media does not have the audience that will benefit your organisation its just another waste of resource.