The Raiser's Edge Cleanup Series: Intro

Hello everyone. I'm here today to speak about how your organization can standardize and clean your Raiser’s Edge database to make the work of your entire company easier. All of the tasks mentioned in this series are discussed in several of our Online and Classroom Training offerings, be sure to check out Training Central for a full list of The Raiser's Edge classes available.

I've worked in nonprofits for six and a half years, and have personally done all of the most common (and often difficult) data tasks. I've pulled large reports, created 10,000+ piece mailings, grouped constituents on very specific criteria in queries, and countless other tasks. But, most importantly, I cleaned up addresses, phone numbers, data tables, and the like for a 100,000+ record database, and I am here to share my experiences and tips with you.

My approach has always been to solve data problems at the source, rather than manually tweaking data for every report, export, or mailing.  This way, all of the work done to clean up your information will remain inside the program, eliminating future effort, and making your life appreciably easier. But solving existing problems alone won't be enough if it will just get bad again in the future. So as part of our discussion on data cleanup, we will speak about the policies and procedures necessary at your organization to solve problems once and for all. I will also, as a Blackbaud training consultant, mention some hand-picked online classes to shed light on these topics.

I have always taken the role as Beneficent Dictator; I wanted to be the one in charge. I realized early on that many problems with data come from people guessing about what to do, since nobody has ever agreed and communicated the correct process. By having a single person in charge, there is a final person in charge of decisions, to clear up any future confusion. However, I also made it clear that if anything wasn't working, or if my assumptions weren't correct, that it could easily change.

Basically, data integrity boils down to three things, and they're even alliterative: Completeness, Correctness, and Consistency. The first two are self-explanatory; you want to make sure that everything entered into your system is accurate and telling as much of the story as possible. But it's the third is where many organizations run into difficulty: entering data consistently. If one person is using the built-in Target field on Bio 2, and another has created an Attribute for Target, then your data processing tasks will become that much more difficult. Similarly, if one person types out Street and another types St, it's now harder to find duplicate records and correctly identify constituents.

Fortunately, The Raiser's Edge has many great tools to fix these recurring issues and some to ensure they don't happen moving forward. Each of these tools has different benefits and can be used for a huge number of cleanup tasks. Everything we do in The Raiser's Edge is part of our own little toolkit and with experience we learn exactly which tool is best served for the job. So be creative with what we'll learn in these sessions and see how you can best adapt the tools to solve your particular problems.

In a series of five upcoming blog posts, we will tackle some of the most pressing problems I've either encountered in my dealings with Raiser's Edge users or my own cleanups as a database administrator. We will tackle standardizing address lines using Global Change and Import Files. We'll see how to clean up the nerve center of your database in the Configuration Tables. Then it's time to really scrub our addresses to reduce duplicate and invalid entries.

From there, we'll have to see. If you have any pressing issues that you would love to see covered, leave a comment below.

I look forward to sharing some ways to make your work life just that much easier and more efficient. I'll see you then.