Input, Output. . .

I am excited to report that even now we are still receiving support for the New Initiatives Campaign (NIC). People are still sending in their “I’m On Board” and “NIC Pledge” forms. We have even begun to process Matching Funds from corporations who support their employees’ generosity. It is really quite humbling to experience this level of support from so many people in our community at so many different levels.


So, now that it is our new fiscal year and we can officially begin implementing our three pronged plan. The first step is the administrative aspects of preparing to move all of our data from one system to the next. I have personally been working with Anne Potter of Extreme Consulting who is helping us to organize our data for this transfer. She and I have been going through all of the data field by field working to determine what information we use, what information we need and how best to map that data to NEON’s standard and custom fields.


We are also working to clean up the data in the database. We want the data to be as pristine as possible by eliminating duplicates or errors that have developed over the years. This means that we are going through and comparing member records and have had a volunteer working on things like standardizing how we input our data. For example, we have now standardized the way we enter the names of churches. This may sound silly but imagine that you work at Saint Peter’s United Methodist Church and have had a membership with AGEHR for many, many years, but you happen to have lost your member number. You call our office and we can’t find your record. Why? Because in our record your church is listed as St. Peters UMC and if you have ever worked with data bases you know we will never find Saint if we are searching for St with a period. Also is it UMC or United Methodist Church? Is there an apostrophe in Peter’s or not when it was entered? By taking the time now to set this standardization up, we are creating ways to improve our data management efficiency which will in the long run benefit you and your membership because we, in the national office, will be set up for success when providing you with the support and service that you need and deserve.


As of right now, we are still on target for our projected delivery date of a complete upgrade of our technology which has been listed as 6/2011. Knock wood, but the administrative process seems to be running smoothly so far. Of course we expect some bumps and kinks to work out as we go, but as this new technology begins to expand your abilities to manage your membership and membership benefits better via the web site, I know our end results will be well worth the efforts.