When it comes to my beliefs about information management for organizations, I like to start with the basics. In any case, the goal of managing information is to further the organization's mission. This principle holds true whether you're communicating to raise funds, strengthen bonds with your users, or align your internal team.
A lot of people complicate information management. But it’s really only two things:
STEP 1: GETTING THE FACTS DOCUMENTED
In my view, information management starts with aligning everyone on the facts. Essentially, you need a 'base truth' for your organization – what it's doing, the progress it's making, who's on the team, and any other information that's important to convey. It's like the raw data you feed into a computer.
Your task is to create a central repository for all this data. It doesn't have to be flashy or eloquent; it just needs to reflect reality.
It’s important to have all the facts in one place. From this pool of data, you can create content that's tailored for specific purposes.
STEP 2: TURNING THE FACTS INTO SUCCESS-DRIVING COMMUNICATIONS
With this source of truth—this human and machine-readable “base reality”—at your fingertips, you can do anything: you can prepare a press kit or write a blog post. Be it a tweet, a sales material for potential investors, or educational content for your community members – everything is grounded in the truth that you have carefully documented in your 'wiki'.
WHERE PEOPLE GO WRONG WITH INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Where people often go astray is when they blend the collection of facts with presentation. When too much emphasis is placed on how the information is presented, the simple task of documenting facts can get overlooked. What you need is to at any given time just do one or the other: document facts, or turn the facts into success-driving communications.
The turning of facts into success-driving communications is easy with AI. With AI, we can transform these facts into targeted communications suitable for different audiences. This could be for fundraising purposes, engaging users, and more.
A good example would be the ThreeFold team creating a fact sheet to document everything that happened at the African Regenerative City Summit. Deciding how to present these facts to the relevant stakeholders while figuring out what actually happened is unnecessarily challenging. But if you first focus on getting all the facts in one place, figuring out how to communicate these facts and to whom becomes simpler.
This two step process (that loops repeatedly) is the foundation for effective information management.