April 9, 2005

Dear Robert;

This is intended as a review of the Fellowship database situation with hopes that we can move forward in the creation and maintenance of a database which will be a useful tool in the furtherance of our work.

Existing databases

Our primary database is the Fellowship membership database.  This started out many years ago as a mailing list created in Dbase III.  Over the years fields were added to indicate membership status, etc.  Family members were included in the primary record so many of the records contain information on more than one member.  This database is used to store contribution information as well.

A number of years ago this database was moved to Microsoft Access and then, last year, to Filemaker Pro.  The Filemaker Pro database contains the reader information but none of the contribution information.  The Filemaker Pro database resides on our organizational server and is used primarily to keep track of individuals who host study groups.  This database contains approximately 12,000 records.

An accounting database is maintained in Oklahoma City.  This database contains information on contributions.  Much of this duplicates contribution information stored in the Access database at the Fellowship office.  However, this database does not contain address information for the contributors.  In addition to contributions, this database contains records of many other organizational financial transactions such as book purchases, conference registration payments, etc.

Each time we sponsor a conference of readers we create a registration database.  These contain name, address, and other information related to the conference.  The majority of conference registrants are individuals who already have entries in the readership database.

There is one additional database and that is related to our online credit card transactions handled through the Skipjack system.  This database keeps records of individuals who make payments or contributions via credit card.  Many of these are duplicates of records existing in the reader database, the accounting database, and various conference registration databases.

Needs and tasks

            1. Integration of these various data sources

            2. Cleanup of existing records, especially in the primary reader database

                        a. Need one record per person

                        b. Current records may have Mr. or Mrs. as part of the first name field

                        c. Need to link with accounting database

            3. Make decisions about on-line access to information vs. publication of reports

            4. Review current mailing list policy and modify if necessary

                        a. (At present individuals wanting mailing lists request them from the office which provides printed labels for the requested subset of the reader database.)

            5.  Integrate primary database with past conference registration databases for analysis.

            6.  Establish procedures for future conference registrations which will use the primary database and serve to check addresses, etc.

            7.  Goal is to have each bit of information stored in only one location -- no duplication of records across multiple databases.

            8.  Make decision about long-term platform commitment -- SQL Server?

            9.  Make administrative changes which will assure that data is well maintained.

            10. Determine policies related to data access (read only), edit permissions, and ability to do custom searches

            11. Need good integration with email system so that emails can be easily sent to selected subsets of the mailing list.

Robert, I think you can probably add to the above list, but this is my current sense of our situation.  I appreciate anything you can do to help move this forward.

In friencship,

David Kantor