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8 Guideposts For Integrating Databases

Nonprofits have been increasingly successful in raising funds on line; quite often-building lists separate from the direct mail or telemarketing responses. Cross referencing between the two can unearth valuable new leads.

However, merging separate databases and extracting useful information from them is not a simple undertaking and can cause substantial problems if not done correctly.
At the recent Direct Marketing Association's annual Washington Nonprofit Federation conference, Angela M. Scala, a technical account manager with ROI Solutions, outlined a number of steps that can ease the process of merging separate databases. They include:

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• Determine what is important. Choose the key data elements, including contribution or biographical background, to transfer.
• Keep the list short. If necessary, break a data transfer into two calls.
• Consider an interpreter. This is a form of data mapping that can direct bits of data to specific locations and translates or interprets them if necessary.
• Run transfers frequently. Weekly or monthly transfers are generally good intervals. Create standard formats to carry this out.
• Set an agenda. Draw up rules covering items such as data that needs to be triggered, priorities for which system will handle each data element, and what do to with duplicates.
• Avoid repetition. Set date parameters to avoid overlap. Create a hierarchy of data matches or create new records when there are no matches.
• Keep the data clean, to avoid logjams or errors during transfer process.
• Quality control. Perform spot checks and reverse flow of data to the original source in order to check its accuracy.
  
  

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This article is from NPT TechnoBuzz, a publication of The NonProfit Times.

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