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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