The value of a database

I had a conversation yesterday with someone who's trying to wrap his head around how to talk with organizers in his organization about what a database does and what value it provides - why they should use it, and how to think about using it.

As I talked with him about his database questions, I realized that it might be a useful exercise to get this out on the net somewhere. Although I suspect that most of us who do tech work with organizers have had some version of this conversation many many times, I don’t know that I’ve seen it in print, so here goes:

I usually start by asking organizers how many people they can track without any additional technology - no paper, no clipboards, no computers, etc. Most folks think about it for a minute and say somewhere between 10 to 20, and that number trends downward as we get into the details of what they feel is important to keep track of – add in things like occupation, number of children, personal history or stories related to the issues in question and folks rapidly downgrade their initial estimates.

Then I ask how many people they can keep track of using the original organizer's database - the clipboard and various paper forms - and the number usually jumps up to around 40-50 or higher depending on how long the person's been an organizer and how meticulous they are about record keeping.

Then I'll ask how many people the organization usually turns out at events like direct actions, press conferences, etc. Organizations without databases, working in urban areas, tend to turn out 30-50 people if they don't have a good data management process. Organizer's math suggests this means that they're capable of making around 100 contacts to turnout those 30 people.

I wrap it up by saying something like "you've been turning out around 30 people to most of your events for the last several years - and what's it going to take for you to build at a bigger scale so you can demonstrate more power and really move your agenda?" The clear answer is always more people and it doesn't take a whole lot to go from more people to a better way of managing member info. Bottom line is that if you want to contact more people, you need a system to track the information that goes beyond the limits of paper and personal memory.