Looking for Mr. Right Now: The Allure of the Database

02:30 AM Sep 14, 2005

Just returned from the New York regional NTEN -- a very low-key event. Next month's Washington NTEN figures to be a much livelier affair. Washington doesn't outdo Gotham in much, but the pokey capital is as thick with nonprofits as it is with marble statues and senatorial sinecures.

The New York event was structured around the vanilla theme, "How to Know When You're Succeeding: Technology Tools to Measure What Matters." NYU's Paul Light gave a great morning keynote. Yours truly perpetrated one-fifth of a speed-geek session during Speed Dating for Databases.

Databases are to nonprofits what cars are to commuters. You know you need one, you use it every day, but when it's time to pop the hood, odds are that you aren't exactly sure what you're looking at. It's the sort of phenomenon that tends to inspire a deliberate obtuseness (let's just pretend that "check engine" light isn't lit, shall we?).

The thing is, databases are just tools, and most of their moving parts have been pretty well sussed out at this point. They're not quite as generic as toothpaste, and we like to think ours is a pretty nifty specimen, but from the standpoint of data storage and access, almost any online database is capable of meeting the basic needs of almost any advocacy-oriented nonprofit. What's important about a database is how you use it -- how you communicate, agitate, supplicate.

That means it's not size and scale that count most, but agility. It's all too easy to be seduced by the Orwellian monitoring powers of the relational database, think of occasions it would be handy to have a merge field for your supporters' favorite flavor of ice cream or high school mascot, tremble at the ability of Purina to get a personalized coupon in your mailbox a fortnight after your visit to the pet store. But the opportunity cost of that approach can easily run into thousands of dollars of staff-hours that might be better spent elsewhere. Databases devour every resource they're allowed to lay hands on. In my first gig, a development position basically became a full-time data management job just to maintain a rather modest membership renewal/gift tracking programme (leaving only the other 40 hours of the week for the rest of the job ...). Even the most innocent accumulations of excess data -- data an organization isn't really likely to have a use for -- act on the system like arterial clogs.

This is the spot where technology has a legitimate contribution to make. Internet databases allow socializing a good portion of the data upkeep legwork that formerly had to take place in-house -- letting supporters join a list themselves, update their own address information, log their own contributions by giving online, and receive automated acknowledgments. Increasingly, they're also powering ways for supporters to connect with one another, activate their networks, and promote your mission outside the immediate oversight of a national office. At the NTEN Speed Geek, we focused less on tools than on the dramatic list-building effect a well-deployed "distributed event" (our system's name for a house party/meet-up tool) had had for one of our users, Sojourners. (warning: their map indexes so many local meetups, the page might take a few seconds to load.)

Fewer inputs, more (potential) outputs. It's the whole point of having tools in the first place, from the atlatl to the zamboni. And now, when the online data management model has been widely field-tested but not yet universally adopted, the advantage of being able to roll out something as powerful as a house party campaign might never be greater. Though whatever databases are on offer next year will be sportier than what's around now, not one will give you back the year you waited on them.

Bottom line: if you're speed-dating databases, don't get bogged down looking for a soul mate. Do your due diligence, but don't overdo it. Meet the basic criteria -- price, compatibility, ease of use, whatever -- and then give heed to Andrew Marvell:

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

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