We Got Years of Member Records Out of Spreadsheets and Into One System

Membership information lived in files and spreadsheets. Names, addresses, phone numbers and dates had been entered different ways over the years, so the same person could look like two different people, and nobody could say with confidence which copy was the current one.

The organization is not a flat list of names either. Members belong to local chapters, hold different kinds of membership, and change status over time. A spreadsheet cannot hold that shape, so it lived in the knowledge of whoever had been doing the job longest. There was also no way to see who had changed a record, or when, which is a problem for any organization that has to account for its own decisions.

• The records they already had came across intact. Inconsistent dates and phone number formats were cleaned up on the way in rather than re-typed by hand.
• Member information sits in one place instead of being copied between files that then quietly disagree with each other.
• The chapter a member belongs to and the type of membership they hold are part of the record, so the shape of the organization lives in the system rather than in one person's memory.
• The right people can see the right records. Staff and administrators get access to what their role needs, and not to what it does not.
• There is a history of changes. Every edit is recorded with what the value was before and what it became, so the question of who changed something has an answer.
• Finding a member is a search rather than a hunt through files.
• Current member and chapter numbers sit on a dashboard instead of being counted by hand every time somebody asks.