Advice needed on potentially 200,000 records into RE

Joanne Danganan

Hi there, I work at a breast cancer research foundation and we currently have 2 flagship programs: a 20-year cohort study with 50,000+ current participants (Health of Women Study or HOW), and a database of willing participants for researchers to utilize in recruitment for their studies (Army of Women or AOW). While Institutional Review Board (IRB) restricts us from soliciting HOW participants, we are looking to import the ~200,000 active participants of our AOW database. Higher ups are thinking that importing all active AOW participants into RE will help us in future solicitations. I hesitate to do this because we do not have complete address information for all 200,000 participants - in fact, we would only have ~80,000 complete addresses. The rest would only have emails. What is your opinion about importing potentially 120,000 records that only have emails? I am more open to importing the ~80,000 records with complete email addresses, rather than importing all 200,000 records and having possibly 80% of those records become inactive anyway from lack of support/donations. Thanks in advance, Joanne Danganan Coordinator, Fundraising and Special Event Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation

JoAnn Strommen

Joanne Danganan:
Hi there, I work at a breast cancer research foundation and we currently have 2 flagship programs: a 20-year cohort study with 50,000+ current participants (Health of Women Study or HOW), and a database of willing participants for researchers to utilize in recruitment for their studies (Army of Women or AOW). While Institutional Review Board (IRB) restricts us from soliciting HOW participants, we are looking to import the ~200,000 active participants of our AOW database. Higher ups are thinking that importing all active AOW participants into RE will help us in future solicitations. I hesitate to do this because we do not have complete address information for all 200,000 participants - in fact, we would only have ~80,000 complete addresses. The rest would only have emails. What is your opinion about importing potentially 120,000 records that only have emails? I am more open to importing the ~80,000 records with complete email addresses, rather than importing all 200,000 records and having possibly 80% of those records become inactive anyway from lack of support/donations. Thanks in advance, Joanne Danganan Coordinator, Fundraising and Special Event Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation

I tend to agree with you on questioning the value of importing 120K emails only.  Do you do email appeals?  If so then the records would definitely have value.  I know some would say add them, I tend to opt for as clean a database as possible and if I'm not going to be contacting them with newsletter/appeal by email they have no value to me.  Especially if there is no plan to use an address service to come up with addresses for them. My 2 cents....

Joanne Danganan

JoAnn Strommen:

I tend to agree with you on questioning the value of importing 120K emails only.  Do you do email appeals?  If so then the records would definitely have value.  I know some would say add them, I tend to opt for as clean a database as possible and if I'm not going to be contacting them with newsletter/appeal by email they have no value to me.  Especially if there is no plan to use an address service to come up with addresses for them. My 2 cents....

Thanks for the advice! I really appreciate it!