New Technology for the Future

The national office has been working hard all summer to develop implementation plans for the New Initiatives announced at Pinnacle in Nashville. The first to launch is the comprehensive technology update that will be complete by June 2011. Over the next few months, J.R. (publications director), Katie (director of membership), and I will be posting more information about what the technology update will entail.

Today, I will share the rationale and process we used in selecting the new database management system that is once piece of this initiative.

The implementation of this system will be a major step to resolving one of the biggest challenges facing the national office on a daily basis. It will also solve the frustrations many of you experience every time you navigate to the AGEHR website and try to login into the member’s only section or make a purchase in our on-line store.

At this time, the national office maintains multiple databases for our daily operations. These include a primary membership database that is used in the office every day to maintain all our membership records and related membership functions. Because of the way this was set-up when initially implemented (before any of the current staff were in the national office), this database cannot communicate directly with our website. As a result, we must operate a separate set of database tables to manage website functions like member’s-only access, the on-line store, and the forums. To make matters more complicated, none of these tables communicate with each other. Yet another service manages our e-newsletters and e-mail blasts. This is why you have separate log-in credentials for each of these functions, and why changes you make to your account in one place don’t immediately get updated to other places.

From the staff side, when a member makes a change to their account, we must go to each of these separate services to manually update the record. You can imagine the amount of time this takes away from other tasks we could and should be doing to serve our membership. We have worked with consultants and programmers to develop a variety of stop-gap resolutions to meet this challenge using the existing technologies available to us, but all have just been weak band-aids and not true solutions. Additionally, our current technology is a barrier to anything new we want to offer our members or potential members.

A real solution to these challenges has been identified and implementation is under way. To make the choice, we worked with a well-respected consultant in Centerville, Ohio (home of the national office). With the consultant’s help, we identified a list of features we must have to achieve our goals. We then divided them into must-haves, should-haves and wish-we-hads. With this information in hand, the consultant did a comprehensive search of available database solutions and returned to us with a detailed list of nearly 20 options along with their recommendations and opinions about each. That list was narrowed to three top choices which were evaluated in more detail by the staff through web demos and long phone conversations with sales representatives and programmers.

The solution we selected is called NEON – Non-profit Enterprise On-line Network. The creators of NEON were software developers in the for-profit sector that saw many small non-profits struggling like we are with finding an all-in-one software solution to manage the growing demands of an increasingly on-line society. So they created NEON which takes technologies used successfully in for-profit business models and adapts them for non-profit needs.

NEON is loaded with features that will make the national office staff more efficient, and your on-line member interaction more rewarding and robust. I'll be providing much more detail about these features in upcoming posts.

Until then - post your questions, comments, and ideas about what I've shared today or about any of the New Initiatives.