[Lnc-business] upgrade to membership database & record reduction

[Wes Benedict]

Robert Kraus, please forward this note to the state chairs and state 
database admins.

LNC Regional representatives, you may want to forward this directly to 
your regions as well.

===================

*SUMMARY*

State Chairs and database admins:

We're planning a minor upgrade to the LNC's Raiser's Edge database 
system over the next couple of months and as part of that expect to 
prune around 200,000 of the lowest quality records from our 500,000+ 
record database.

No action is required from you on this, and at least in the short run 
you should not notice any changes in how we use and share data beyond 
the fact that the spreadsheets we email to you will be shorter.

*MORE BACKGROUND & DETAIL*

For over ten years, the national LP has used a membership database 
program called Raiser's Edge, a system provided by the company Blackbaud 
<https://www.blackbaud.com/>https://www.blackbaud.com/.

For most of those ten years we've used one of the most stripped down 
entry-level versions of the software. The program is installed and run 
on servers at our headquarters office. Among all of staff's other 
various duties, those servers are maintained, backed up, troubleshooted, 
etc., by staff. New versions of the software are downloaded and 
installed by staff. Occasionally, when the servers keep crashing or what 
have you, and staff can't get things working with the help of hardware 
and Blackbaud or Microsoft tech support, we bring in other experts and 
pay them by the hour to troubleshoot them for us. The two servers we use 
today I believe were bought in 2010, back when I was frustrated over how 
slow our program ran. Those new servers made a huge difference, but are 
getting old again.

We'll be upgrading to Raiser's Edge NXT 
<https://www.blackbaud.com/fundraising-and-relationship-management/raisers-edge-nxt>. 
The program will be hosted (or installed) on servers run by Blackbaud. 
Raiser's Edge will be "on the cloud" on servers run and maintained by 
Blackbaud, instead of on servers in our basement that are run and 
maintained by my overworked and under-specialized staff.

We've recently hired a couple of people to help with fundraising. By 
having Raisers Edge hosted on the cloud, we'll have an easier time 
giving access to people outside of the LPHQ office, and those offsite 
users will experience a better user interface than what we can do for 
them today with the program in our basement.

It is possible that we will be able to offer access to state leaders to 
their portions of the membership database, and also possible that we'll 
choose to add additional features in the future, but I don't want to 
promise any of that at this time. I've seen too many projects and 
programs over promise and under-deliver, and I don't want to do that 
right off the bat.

Another key feature we'll gain is we'll be able to embed donation forms 
directly into our websites. Many donations will be processed directly by 
the new software, rather than having to import them from our website, or 
type them in manually.

Some of our renewal processes can be streamlined. To send renewal 
emails, our current process is to download a list from Raisers Edge, 
modify the columns of data, then upload that list into our email blast 
service, iContact, send the renewal email to those contacts, and the 
recipients then donate at LP.org/membership. We then have to manually 
link those donations to the members record in Raisers Edge, which is 
easy for unique names like Nicholas Sarwark, but more difficult for the 
65 John Smith's in our database, and the people like Robert Benedict and 
Wes Benedict who sometimes use their middle names. Additionally, it's 
particularly hard when one of those Smiths moves to a new address and we 
don't always know if they are new person, or an old member renewing at a 
new address. With Raisers Edge NXT, we'll be able to email people from 
directly within Raisers Edge NXT with links to donate that match the 
donation exactly with the existing record.  We'll save time, increase 
accuracy, and cut down on the number of customer service complaints.

Our old (current) version of Rasiers Edge costs us a flat fee per year. 
The new version will be based on how many records we have in the 
database. For that reason, we've taken a close look at our records to 
see what we could purge to keep our costs in check.

Our practice for decades has been to never delete a record. That means 
if someone went to our website in 1996 to request information, but never 
donated and never left a valid email address or phone number, that 
record could still be in our database. If someone added a contact as 
part of a joke in 1997, that contact is probably still in there.

We don't plan to purge any records for anyone that has ever given money 
to the national LP (donors 1971-2017).
We don't plan to purge any records for anyone that has ever "signed the 
pledge" and is therefore at least a non-dues-paying member of the party 
(members 1971-2017), unless they are deceased or have requested to be 
dropped from our membership database.
We don't plan to purge any records for anyone that has a valid email 
address (emails 199?-2017).

We do plan to purge people that were added on or before 12/31/2007, yet 
have never donated, have never "signed the membership pledge", have no 
valid email address, and have no valid phone number (around 200,000 
contacts).

Purging these low-value contacts would probably be worth doing whether 
were upgrading our database or not, simply to cut out the clutter, both 
for the national LP's benefit, and for the state and local affiliates 
that use our data. Removing these contacts will save national and state 
leaders time and money by not wasting resources contacting them.

Our plan is to purge those 200,000 records and save them in a 
spreadsheet. We'll have the option to re-import them later if we change 
our minds. Additionally, we'll break up the 200,000 records into batches 
that we'll forward on to the respective states.

I think it's possible that if a handful of states prefer to retain the 
low-value obsolete data in Raiser's Edge, we can probably accommodate 
that. If you want to retain your old contacts in Raisers Edge, please 
send a note to Robert.Kraus at lp.org with your request.

If it has been a long time since you have sent the records from your 
state's database that aren't already in the national database for 
integration into the national LP database, please send that to 
Robert.Kraus at lp.org as well.

Some people may be interested in whether or not we should be sticking 
with Raiser's Edge, or should we move to SalesForce, NationBuilder, 
CiviCRM, or something else. My thoughts are that most major membership 
databases would be fine with me. At the risk of pointing the finger at 
myself, our staff, and the LNC, I don't think the data and information 
challenges we have faced over the years are due to the brand of software 
we use. I can use most any major brand of software. Our challenges are 
that we haven't done as much as we could to maintain our data, share our 
data, learn how to use our systems, train our affiliates where 
applicable, and add features to whatever software packages we use.

Upgrading Raisers Edge is easier than switching to a different vendor. 
I'm afraid that if we simply switched to a different vendor, we'd be too 
busy with the conversion to focus on upgrading our actual procedures and 
practices. Garbage-in, garbage-out, garbage moved next door, or whatever.

Upgrading Raiser's Edge today won't preclude us from moving to something 
else in the future. Upgrading successfully and adding some features 
today, might make it more clear in the future that something else is 
better for us.

As we work on this, we may find the need to adjust our plans. We'll try 
to keep you informed along the way.

Thanks,

-- 
Wes Benedict, Executive Director
Libertarian National Committee, Inc.
1444 Duke St., Alexandria, VA 22314
(202) 333-0008 ext. 232,wes.benedict at lp.org
facebook.com/libertarians @LPNational
Join the Libertarian Party at:http://lp.org/membership

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