Database Woes

I'm in Seattle for the weekend at a Camp Wellstone training, and I wanted to share something from the "Technology" section from our campaign training notebook:

Maintaining current, accurate records of voters, volunteers, and donors is essential. A well run and well maintained database is a great benefit fro tracking potential and actual donors, filing financial reports, and running voter contact programs that might include voter identification, persuasion, and get out the vote (GOTV).

Amen! Over the last four weeks, I've been working with NGP to get Progressive Majority's old Access database imported to NGP's online system. It's been an excruciating experience, mostly because the old database was full of disjointed and inconsistent information. Everyone from our Development Director to state office volunteers had entered information, and as a result, the data was highly disorganized. In importing our data over to NGP, we had to deal with a host of problems-- past contributions were entered as pledged future contributions, joint household records had to be split into individual records, etc.

So it's been a trial. But I have a new appreciation for well-designed databases, especially those that are created with political campaigns in mind. NGP is specifically designed with campaigns in mind, and as a result, fields and pull-downs are built to make creating Call Sheets and FEC reports as easy as possible.

I'm also becoming increasingly aware of how important it is to have tech-friendly people working in political offices (Emi, I'm sure you'll appreciate this realization!). I'm convinced that one of the reasons I was hired was because I have a background in technology and am comfortable with computers, web design, blogs, and web interfaces. It's not enough to have a computer consultant on staff; you need politicos who are tech-savvy to really make the best use of the technology.