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

Tue Jan 24 17:25:55 EST 2017

Wes,

Thanks for that email.  
As you know I am pushing, if technically feasible for our state affiliates to be given relevant access and use of Raisers Edge NXT.  Andy Burns, our Affiliate Development specialist believes that the the best way he can help affiliates is to give those that are willing integrated, appropriate access to the national data and an integrated CRM.  RE NXT is what we have available to us and I know he wants to work with it to see if it would indeed be of use to our affiliates.  

I know that Andy would like to assist with getting RE NXT up and running.  If affiliates get access at some point it's going to be Andy that is assisting them if not outright implementing it for them.  Wouldn't it make sense for him to help with getting RE up and running for the National Party?  I would assume that you would understand his frustration as he feels that he can help and at the same time gain a greater understanding of how to set up RE and how to use it for if and when we roll it out to various states.

It was just a short time ago that you were not allowed to be involved with getting the National website up and running.  I am sure your input would have been valuable in it being done better and more efficiently.  I would think it might be the same with letting Andy help with getting RE up and running especially with regards to deploying it in the future for affiliates.  Of course as a contractor he sets his tasks and schedule in order to achieve the end goal but I am pretty certain that he considers this needed to reach his objective of developing affiliates.

As chairman of the affiliate support committee I feel comfortable saying that data and the ability and knowledge of how to use it is the most universal need expressed by our affiliates.

It's  possible and likely that RE won't be able to meet all the data needs for all the affiliates but it will help to provide an donation management solution that is integrated between affiliates and national for those willing to participate.  It MIGHT however prove to be able to do everything needed.  The only way to know is to try and let our Affiliate Development specialist assist in getting it up and running.

Daniel Hayes
LNC At Large Member

On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:20 AM, Wes Benedict <wes.benedict at lp.org> wrote:

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/. 

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. 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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