to home page  Home   E-Mail   Page Bottom   Tools       • Home Page  • Whats New  • Site Map  • Web Links • Calendar  • Contacts • Strategic Plan  • notes 

Contacts

We have a database of 1016 faith communities and 503 non-profit helping agencies in Palm Beach County. Beginning at a meeting on October 12 at Adopt-A-Family we have created a coalition of 9 of the most important non-profits to develop a strategy for accessing faith communities as part of our strategy to end homelessness. We need an on-line relational database for maintaining the contact info for those 1519 organizations and whatever people in them we wish to keep track of as well as about 800 other “friends” not yet connected to any organization. Total number of “people” is about 1400 but we might easily expand it to 2400 or so. (updated 12/11/09 23:31)

Conclusion & Proposal

Our database should be available on-line with maintenance possible from multiple locations. The best technology for that today is "cloud" technology and a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software is what is needed. The leading vendor of that technology is SalesForce.com which is used by Family Promise of South Palm Beach County. This software has immense potential, but use of it is not trivial. If we are to use it, one or two lead managers need to be identified and more people should get training in its use. We asked SalesForce.com who in South Florida could help us and they identified II-USA in Miami Lakes. Mark Carson & Javier Gonzalez have reviewed our functional requirements and proposed to help us at cost to us of $4950. Detailed proposal will be available in the week of November 2. Furthermore, one non-profit (with 501-C3 status) should be our lead organization and should apply for 10 free Enterprise licenses from SalesForce.com. This makes the database available; we can call this Phase I. At the same time, other efforts should begin to use the database well.
  1. How will our various non-profits work together to share the list? It is NOT expected that non-profits will abandon current efforts to join this effort. Instead, this effort will augment their current efforts.
  2. What will we seek ? Obviously volunteer effort, donations and jobs.
  3. How about let's get creative (and tasteful) in describing the needs of real people and asking for help. Needs can be presented in a website which respects privacy, highlights urgent needs, allows easy selection of the sorts of needs for which one would like to help, and makes it easy to offer help. A process must also be designed to ensure that offers of help get good followup. Everyone who offers to help believes that their offer is important and offers not handled well will greatly weaken the process.
  4. How will we design e-mails to make them inviting, welcome, and effective. The e-mail of Oct 28 noontime promoting the Family Promise event of Nov 5 was one attempt. The e-mail sender was FaithInActionPBC@earthlink.net. E-mails should be short, easily readable, with links to more information. A new format is needed that will make it easy for the e-mail to present several ideas, needs, or events in a concise and inviting way.
  5. We need to figure out how to approach and work within faith communities so that they can best respond to the opportunity we offer them.
  6. Governance: what person or persons decide when and how to use this capability ?
  7. ....

Functional Requirements

This data has already been put into .csv files and successfully imported into SalesForce.com, but next steps there are not self-evident. So, these are the functional requirements for assistance to help us be able to start using the database. It is anticipated that this assistance will leave several of us sufficiently trained to do future development and maintenance work as well as training of others.

Changing or Adding To Data

A volunteer or staff person should be able to correct or add to the existing database.
An html form should exist accessable by anyone on the internet where they can enter data for our database and send it to us, perhaps by e-mail.
We need to ability to read data sent to us using the html form, make sure it looks right, and enter it easily into our database.

Easily Importing Data Into Our Database

We need give the correct field names to our csv files so SalesForce can appropriately & easily import data.

Easily Exporting Data From Our Database

It should be easy for us to export data from our database for use in another environment, format should be same as csv import files.

Send Bulk E-Mails to All or Some of Our Database

We need to be able to maintain or generate sublists of our contacts to send selective bulk e-mails.

Print Snail Mail Labels

We need to print paper mailing labels for all or selected contacts.

Questions

Can we get from our database info using SQL type statements for use in other applications ?

Discuss

We need to articulate how staff can retrieve info for convenient use, and in lots of ways play with it.
We need to understand what will be required to identify undeliverable e-mails and to update the database.
We need to understand how duplicate names & e-mail addresses can be handled to eliminate redundancy. We don't want to send the same message to anyone more than once.
I understand there are serious penalities for failing to provide an opt out option. How do we handle this.

Below are details on the files available to be imported into SalesForce.com (revised since original import). We can revise these files to improve what is being imported in SalesForce.com (e.g. to make sure contact on helping agencies is included). These files are the entire database that shows up in the following webpages:
  1. Our List of Faith Communities lists 1015 congregations. The list can be viewed by municipality and by denomination .
  2. Our Database of Helping Agencies includes 503 organizations.
c:\fp\db\accounts1.csv51207 bytes12/11/09 07:27
c:\fp\db\accounts2.csv51753 bytes 9/ 6/09 07:22
c:\fp\db\accounts3.csv2199 bytes 9/ 6/09 07:22
c:\fp\db\agencies1.csv45207 bytes 9/27/09 13:50
c:\fp\db\agencies2.csv3969 bytes10/24/09 12:08
c:\fp\db\contacts1.csv41440 bytes 9/ 5/09 11:20
c:\fp\db\contacts2.csv3877 bytes12/11/09 07:28
c:\fp\db\people1.csv42918 bytes12/11/09 07:28
c:\fp\db\people2.csv34951 bytes12/11/09 07:29
c:\fp\db\people3.csv2142 bytes 9/ 5/09 23:34

accounts1.csv ; #records: 499 ; #fields: 14 ; # Account Names 499, "INST" 499, Abbr-I 223, "HAG" 0, Abbr-H 0
accounts2.csv ; #records: 499 ; #fields: 14 ; # Account Names 499, "INST" 498, Abbr-I 173, "HAG" 6, Abbr-H 0
accounts3.csv ; #records: 18 ; #fields: 14 ; # Account Names 18, "INST" 18, Abbr-I 11, "HAG" 0, Abbr-H 0
Totalaccounts1.csvaccounts2.csvaccounts3.csv
Account Name 1016 499 499 18
Billing Address Line 1 904 443 447 14
Billing Address Line 2 149 72 73 4
Billing City 1009 492 499 18
State/Province 1016 499 499 18
Postal Code 1016 499 499 18
Account Email 50 23 23 4
Account Phone 661 335 313 13
Account Fax 61 36 22 3
Website 85 51 29 5
Type 764 390 365 9
Abbr 407 223 173 11
Families 1016 499 499 18
Account Comment 68 35 28 5

agencies1.csv ; #records: 499 ; #fields: 11 ; # Account Names 458, "INST" 4, Abbr-I 0, "HAG" 315, Abbr-H 457
agencies2.csv ; #records: 66 ; #fields: 11 ; # Account Names 66, "INST" 2, Abbr-I 0, "HAG" 54, Abbr-H 66
Totalagencies1.csvagencies2.csv
Account Name 524 458 66
Abbr 523 457 66
Type 98 95 3
FirstName 99 94 5
LastName 99 94 5
Title 99 94 5
StreetAddr 99 94 5
City 99 94 5
Zip 99 94 5
Phone 99 94 5
Text40 98 94 4

contacts1.csv ; #records: 499 ; #fields: 15 ; # Account Names 499, "INST" 469, Abbr-I 469, "HAG" 4, Abbr-H 0
contacts2.csv ; #records: 48 ; #fields: 15 ; # Account Names 48, "INST" 44, Abbr-I 44, "HAG" 0, Abbr-H 0
Totalcontacts1.csvcontacts2.csv
Account Name 513 469 44
Prefix 222 203 19
First Name 526 492 34
Last Name 534 499 35
Suffix 11 9 2
Title 196 186 10
Phone 318 308 10
Home Phone 7 7 
Fax 23 20 3
Mobile 10 8 2
Email 193 167 26
Email Personal 6 6 
Type 290 266 24
Contact Comment 57 36 21
Abbr 513 469 44

people1.csv ; #records: 499 ; #fields: 10 ; # Account Names 499, "INST" 19, Abbr-I 18, "HAG" 43, Abbr-H 43
people2.csv ; #records: 449 ; #fields: 10 ; # Account Names 449, "INST" 58, Abbr-I 56, "HAG" 26, Abbr-H 28
people3.csv ; #records: 49 ; #fields: 10 ; # Account Names 49, "INST" 0, Abbr-I 0, "HAG" 0, Abbr-H 0
Totalpeople1.csvpeople2.csvpeople3.csv
Account Name 598 334 263 1
Prefix 30 3 27 
First Name 962 496 441 25
Last Name 974 499 449 26
Suffix 2  2 
Email 750 364 337 49
Phone 164 77 87 
Mobile 56 29 27 
Abbr 898 495 378 25
City 371 236 135 

• Home Page  • Whats New  • Site Map  • Web Links • Calendar  • Contacts • Strategic Plan  • notes 

 Home   E-Mail   Page Top