Welcome to 2024! Starting a new year always seems to bring fresh energy with it – and new resolutions. In our last blog, we introduced you to Dotty Data and her New Year’s resolutions, and in this blog, we’d like to highlight one of her goals for 2024 – losing weight.

Databases can be full of outdated and irrelevant information making them much bigger than they need to be. And your primary collection tools – forms – may contain questions that don’t really matter and omit questions whose answers could be very revealing. Reducing the size of your database can make your work life much smoother.

If you’d like to slim down your data this year to make it more useful and easier to manage, we have 9 recommendations, starting with why you should bother:

 

1.  What’s the point in cleaning up our database?

Your data has a story to tell if you are able to ask the right questions. Storing only relevant and current information will help your team ask great questions but also will allow easier access to the answers.

One association we know started digging into their data and found that HR directors were the best predictors of membership renewal. When an HR director in a member company left the job, the company’s likelihood of renewing its membership declined dramatically. Using this information, the association reached out immediately to new HR directors with information about how the association helps its members. The early intervention helped keep company memberships from lapsing.

Your data can tell you many similar stories about how your membership responds to your association. When data is a manageable size, you can search for trends. You can get answers to questions like: Are there similarities among people who renew or who cancel? Does increasing dues affect renewals? Is your membership retiring? Are you replacing lost members with new members? What percentage of possible members are actually members? Accurate data can help you understand your membership in surprising ways.

 

2. What’s your goal?

Like most management decisions, however, you need to define your goals about collecting and storing information. We recommend you start with the following questions: Why do you think your data needs work? Are you preparing for a data migration? Are you paying for storage you don’t really need? Does the size of your database make analysis difficult? 

Before you start planning the process, define the desired outcome. If you have narrow goals, you can tailor your data collection and analysis to meet them. Storing all the data you can possibly collect is rarely a good business strategy, but if you have an important business reason for collecting everything, don’t hesitate to do it. Your goals will help inform your data decisions.

 

3. What data can your association realistically maintain?

We have a favorite rule: If you can’t maintain the data you collect, don’t collect it. Data that isn’t current isn’t particularly helpful. To start the process, update your members’ most basic contact information. You can even let members update their own records. 

Updating more complicated information like a social media presence, however, can be time consuming and of questionable value. Don’t waste your energy on trying to update data you won’t use and, as soon as possible, delete it from your active database. 

One way to update your lists every year is to buy commercial lists and compare them to your internal data. Some associations simply include a line item in their annual budgets to pay for those lists. Love it or hate it, we can buy almost any information we want about our members, but it can get expensive. We recommend that, if you update with purchased lists, that you only buy the information you really need.

 

4. What if someday I need the data that I’ve just deleted?

If you’re nervous about deleting data, we have a suggestion. Copy the data you intend to delete into its own database as an archive. If you need the data in the future, you can check the historical record. By storing it safely in an archive, you can delete the data you can’t maintain from your active database, reducing the size of the database, making it easier to analyze and lowering the cost of storage.

 

5. What should I tackle first?

We recommend that you start with the basics. Pick the low-hanging fruit first. Start with contact information and duplicate records. Ask your membership team to identify records that may have issues. They work with member records every day and have great anecdotal evidence about problems in the system. Each association is different, but you don’t have to start with the most complicated problem first. Enjoy a few easy wins before moving on.

 

6.  Can you identify your source of truth?

We borrowed the term “source of truth” from software developers and data analysts. The term is an easy way to identify the primary database – the database that stores current information about members. Information from the source of truth flows to secondary databases, such as those for donors, learning systems and event registration, but information from the secondary databases doesn’t flow back into the source of truth. The data only goes one way. 

By restricting the flow of data between databases, you can keep from overwriting current records with old information. Review your business processes to make sure records are regularly updated in the primary database – not the secondary databases. Then check to be sure your downloads are transferring data properly to secondary systems. By understanding where the data lives and how it moves, all your teams can trust the data they use.

 

7.  Must I manually review each record in my database?

Even small associations can have thousands or millions of records in their systems. We certainly aren’t suggesting that you manually review each one. Even reviewing information for several hundred members isn’t practical. Instead, use available apps like those that search for duplicate records or correct mailing addresses to help you recognize problems in your data. As a failsafe, it’s always a good idea to make a copy of your database before you run any apps or permanently delete data.

And one of the best ways to update contact information is to ask your members. Let them correct issues with their own records. Make a campaign of it and offer incentives to those who participate.

 

8. Should I try to document relationships between people in my database?

Some of our clients want to show connections between people in their database. For example, fundraisers might want to know which members share a former employer or might have served on committees together. Certainly, they would like to know about family relationships. The impetus for collecting information like this is understandable – the more you know about donors, the easier it is to tailor messages to them, arrange meetings and increase donations.

We have found, however, that maintaining connection records in a database is difficult, particularly if the database is large. If storing these connections is important to your mission, we suggest you limit it to the top 5% of your membership or your top donors and maintain connections only in their records. You’ll have a better chance of keeping records current if you limit the number of members involved.

 

9. Can you justify asking for the information you collect?

People in general are wary of giving away personal information unless they know how it will be used. They respond even better if they understand the benefit to them in providing it. For example, your members may not object to giving you their office phone numbers, but they may not want to share their mobile numbers. 

Similarly, members may be hesitant to give you their birth dates unless you can explain why you want them and how you plan to protect them. One association we know had members who were ostensibly born in the early 1900s – clearly improbable. The association took the hint and did a better job of explaining how they use birthdates and the number of bogus dates dropped dramatically.

Updating your database is an ongoing practice. As you tackle these housekeeping tasks during 2024, plan your approach for 2025. With good planning, your task may be smaller next year, but it’s likely that you’ll never quite finish the job – like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. When the painters finish at one end, they start over at the other.

If cleaning your database seems overwhelming or if you’d just like to ask the experts, Intellidata is here to help. Please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@intellida.tech. Our team (and Dotty Data) love data housekeeping!