"Touchy-feely" database

I watch organizations treat their database like a technology add-on when, in fact, it should be treated as the central lifeline for customer care. It’s the digital “turnstile” for a person’s connections, history, growth, safety, milestones, relationships as well as a place to find trend indicators and organizational health reports. Contrary to popular belief, the database is very “touchy-feely”.

That is why we haven’t assigned a technology-guru or someone with mad data entry skills to be in charge of our database. Instead, we've hand-picked a representative from each department to form a SuperTeam.

The Why

As our church grew, we found our ourselves in a place with multiple community touch points—each serving up a different experience, off and running in their own direction, capturing (or not capturing) their own data. When individual teams track data their own way—using systems unique to their team only—critical information gets lost or isolated. People and projects proliferate—as does confusion. This creates real liabilities for the organization as a whole.

Here are just a few examples of problems we experienced at Granger in the past.

• People with pre-schoolers or who no longer had children at home consistently received letters addressed “Dear middle school parent”.
• A family in our church lost a child. For several weeks in a row after that horrendous loss, a check-in tag for their deceased son would print at the kiosk when they checked in their other children.
• We had volunteers with serving restrictions due to moral or security reasons, who would move from team to team repeating the offense because there was no central filing system to proactively alert team leaders.
• We had several people flagged as core covenant members who had not been active in the church for over six years.
• We had people who had moved out of state still flagged as attendees.
• We mailed sensitive and confidential contribution statements to the wrong address.
• A widow in our church continued to receive correspondence addressed to her deceased husband.

Not only was each event discouraging and painful for the members affected, but also for us as a staff. We wanted to sincerely reinforce how much the church cares with our customer service, not just with our words. The only way to resolve these issues was to connect the individual ministry areas together so operate as part of a larger family. Getting our database in order, and assembling a SuperTeam to protect it, was the only responsible thing to do.*

Peter Drucker, management guru, makes the best case for it, “The successful company is not the one with the most brains, but the most brains acting in concert.”

The What

Our SuperTeam meets for about an hour once a month to share stories that provide the needed context for data decisions and the systems that support them. They ask questions, clarify intentions and learn the benefits of relevant functionality.** With a “shared ownership” mindset, they help discover how the pieces fit together and determine next steps to maximize operations church-wide, not just for one department. Most conversations are about topics of shared impact like volunteers, staff responsiveness, event registrations, sensitive data, lists, reporting, check-in, etc.

When they're not meeting, each SuperTeam member operates as a power-user for their area of ministry. They watch for and address inconsistencies; in data and reporting. They champion the team approach to increase the effectiveness of our whole organization.

What About You?

Is somebody flying solo with your database today? Set the stage for your SuperTeam strategy sooner rather than later. Ask that person to partner with just one other champion and operate as a team unit to put technology to work for you; not the other way around.

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*     Our SuperTeam includes at least one person from each of these areas: arts, children and students, administrative support, IT, facilities, connections, counseling, finance, communications and missions. Your SuperTeam may only start out with two people. Ours did.

**   We are satisfied users of Fellowship One. It's been a great solution for us.

Comments

[Neil Nuttall]

Great post Kem! Thanks!

I have shared this with our champions in the hope that the reasoning behind what we're trying to do will inspire them.

As F1 newbies, we're struggling a little to get a cohesive super-team and full department-head buy-in, but I think we'll get there (eventually)

[Jared]

Thanks for this great post! I look forward to reading more from you!

[Greg]

Kem,

Thanks for the post, I'm currently the F1 Champ for our transition. We've identified our Champion Team members and Data Integrity Team; training is in full swing. It's Nuts!!!

Hope you don't mind I shared you post with the team!

Thanks again

Greg

[Casey Ross]

Thanks, Kem! A friend of mine said something last year that will always stick in my thinking: systems are environments. In my world, we create environments that foster life change. To think that even the systems we ask people (attenders and staff) to go through are environments, is a significant thought. I posted about her quote a couple of times:

http://caseyr.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/systems-are-environments-part-one/

http://caseyr.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/systems-can-be-environments-part-two/

[kemmeyer]

Tim, great question. I passed it on to Dave Moore, our director of finance, and here's how he responded.

"Although it would be nice if the two systems were integrated, we’re good with having to enter the data twice. Out of all the systems we’ve used to date, the combination of F1 and Great Plains requires the least amount of manual effort to get contributions properly recorded in both systems. After everything is processed in F1, all we really have to do to get contributions posted into Great Plains is book a journal entry using reports we run from F1. However, running the reports and reconciling them to the totals we need to post the journal entries in Great Plains requires some extra effort. We’re OK with the extra effort because it ensures that the data we processed in F1 is valid and accurate and that the totals we’re posting to Great Plains match. Because this ensures integrity, we’d do this to some extent even if everything was fully automated and integrated. The automation of the contribution process in F1 using the scanner for check processing and donor directed online giving more than makes up for the time we spend reconciling the two systems."

You can keep up with Dave at http://mooreforthemoney.blogspot.com/

[Curtis Simmons]

Tim,

The processing of contributions requires a bit more explanation. F1 stores the line item details, which donor gave to what Fund/Subfund/Pledge Drive at what Service. While the Accounting system stores summary role ups of the total amount given to a Fund/Subfund (i.e., Major/Minor Acct Code). So traditionally there isn't much to input into the Acct system. But, F1 can also generally provide formatted exports for the data format of your Acct system. Regardless, yes we will be working on integration to one or two Acct packages this year.

Feel free to contact us for more explanation and a demonstration.

God bless,

Curtis Simmons
EVP, Customer Effectiveness

[Justin Moore]

Tim,

FYI: F1 is planning to add a GL component sometime in 2009. You can probably find more info at http://experience.fellowshipone.com

[Tim Jack]

Noticed that you are using Fellowship One. We need to change. How does your accounting dept feel about having to enter data twice (assuming there is not an interface with F1). What accounting solution did you choose?