I’ve posted a new white paper on my website, entitled “Nine Keys to Long Term Success of Your Association Management System”
The paper is based on extensive interviews with eight associations who feel they have had successful long-term AMS implementations. The nine key findings:
- …a successful, long-term relationship with the vendor.
- …a stable staff.
- …buy-in from senior staff.
- …a willingness to spend on technology as needed.
- …pushing self-serve functionality.
- …standardizing processes and documenting them.
- …participation from key staff from implementation through to day-to-day use.
- …communicating with staff and board about the database.
- …decentralizing data entry.
Of course, if you’re already on my announcements list, you would have received notice of this new article right in your email box.
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I appreciated Ron Moen’s comment that his association, AMC, often invests in outside resources to help them clean up the data in their database, to ensure its integrity. We’ve talked about doing that but haven’t known quite how to go about it. Where do you find outside resources that do that sort of thing? What’s a reasonable amount for them to charge (I presume per hour)? How should the contract be structured? By hours? By task? Besides duplicates, how will an outside person be able to spot data that has gone out of date or is inaccurate? I’ve seen you mention checking for bad email addresses and zip/state mismatches, but I’d love to find a more exhaustive list and explanation of such techniques. Tips would be much appreciated!
BTW – I did search for and read some other posts of yours on this subject but didn’t find answers to the above questions. I apologize if I missed anything in my searches.
-Sam
Sam, thanks for the comment. The best place to start would be to identify all of the data integrity issues you want to address. Are the issues around duplicate data, bad data, missing data? Once you’ve identified the issues, then you can begin discussing alternatives for addressing the issues. These alternatives may include changing your business rules, and/or hiring outside help to fix things. In addition you might consider an outside consultant to help you identify issues and alternatives.
Also, are you focusing on the data you really need and actually use? Check out this article about collecting too much data: http://effectivedatabase.com/MoreDataisBetterRight.shtml
Finally be sure to read these three articles on consistent data management:
http://effectivedatabase.com/steady_as_she_goes.shtml
http://effectivedatabase.com/consistent_keying.shtml
http://effectivedatabase.com/greatness_thru_data.shtml
Good luck!
Wes