Database Planning

The Gay and Lesbian Choruses (GALA Choruses ) is an arts service organization that provides professional development in artistic and managerial domains, capacity building services, events, conferences, and networking. They operate an office in Washington, DC where 3 full-time staff work. Three other staff members, who are responsible for events management and fundraising, work from home offices located in Florida.

In 2001, GALA Choruses received a technology grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. The grant covered funding for a mission-driven technology planning process followed by an implementation grant. The DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities contracted with the New York Foundation for the Arts to provide the planning component based on the NYFA's Knowledge in Technology program . I was the consultant assigned to work with GALA Choruses and guide them in their quest to develop a technology plan.

To begin our work together, GALA Choruses was charged with assembling a technology team consisting of staff, board members, and volunteers. As part of an assessment process which looked at all aspects of the organization's use of technology and current technology infrastructure, the team zeroed in on its members database as its top priority. Drilling deeper into this issue, the team identified a number of challenges related to remote access to the database between the two offices, including information design, training, connectivity, and hardware. Since GALA Choruses had a small staff who all used the information from the database for their work, everyone on staff was involved in the planning work.

Change, Challenge, and Choices

Almost five years ago, GALA Choruses purchased an off-the-shelf database package especially designed to manage membership programs for nonprofit associations. They also upgraded their computer hardware, an investment that had initially served the organization well. At the time of the purchase, all staff members worked from a single office in downtown DC, and they were able to access to the database from a local area network. However, when the organization's work environment changed, the staff members working remotely from Florida became unable to access the membership database. This led to very inefficient work methods and lots of frustration.

It was time to place a line in the sand--something had to change. But what? The team faced a dizzying array of choices, but the main question was: should they upgrade their current software package (which hadn't upgraded for several years) and add appropriate remote access, or should they switch to a Web-based ASP?

In order to begin to answer these questions, the team looked for ways to improve the internal information flow between the Florida and DC offices. They found that staff members are able to work more effectively as a team, as it allows them to capture institutional knowledge around processes and systems for managing member events, and minimize inefficient, redundant, and frustrating work flow tasks.

The team was disciplined, which kept them from immediately jumping to solutions. Instead, they tackled the difficult work of mapping the flow of information to and from the members database and to and from the DC and Florida offices. The Team reviewed and mapped out the granular details of the types and formats of reports they'd need from the membership database to make effective and timely decisions. Part of this work included looking at different levels of access--who needed to simply view and extract information from the system versus who needed to edit/add information.

A Surprising Discovery

Through the team's discussions around their work processes, they decided that the current software (with upgrades and additional modules) did in fact serve their information needs. The planning work provided an opportunity for the staff members to become more familiar with the members database. This resulted in the discovery that their biggest challenge was that staff did not have proper training on how to use the system. As one person on the team noted, "It was like everyone on staff was saying we hate blueberries (with blueberries being the existing database software) because they were never trained on how and where to select blueberries that weren't over ripe or not yet ready to eat."

This led the team to think about effective training strategies. The director of operations for the organization had received formal training on the system and was previously serving as the database intermediary for the remote offices--running reports from the system and faxing them or emailing them to staff members in Florida. The team decided that they would follow a peer-training approach, having the person on staff with the most knowledge train others. As part of the work flow-mapping process described above, organizing step-by-step instructions for training materials and later reference became a simple task. In addition, the team gathered and organized additional resource information including tutorials, an online user group, and classroom training available from the software reseller. The final steps in the planning process were to evaluate the most secure and efficient way to set up remote access in the DC office and to upgrade to high speed Internet connection for the remote offices.

A Lesson Learned

It is quite possible that if technology choices and solutions were introduced earlier in the planning process, new software and hardware might have been purchased. By staying focused on the processes that needed improvement and the data needs, not the data tools, GALA Choruses was able to make strategic decisions that increased staff investment and organizational knowledge.