Recommendations on minimum data requirements for email only

Karen Takamoto

Does anyone have recommendations (positives or negatives) regarding minimum data requirements for adding new non-donor constituent records to Raiser’s Edge. We have been tasked to add email addresses collected from email sign up lists into our systems and be able to track where we received the email address. These lists have only an email address, most times a first name, sometimes a last name. I am concerned with adding them to the Raiser’s Edge database with such limited identifying information. The other option is to add them only to our online database to include them in email distribution. Hoping to hear pros and cons of either scenario. Thanks!


 

Crystal Bruce

Discussion moved to Raiser's Edge forums. Thanks!

Phillip Bicknell

We only add a constituent to Raiser's when there's a donation (or a few special cases).


Otherwise our digital platform (Engaging Networks) has twice as many opted-in emails again as our Raiser's, and another eight times as many not opted-in but necessary for petition signatures.


And last I heard NXT is costed by number of constituent records, not like Raiser's by concurrent logged-in users.

Matthew Nareff

The only ways I know to do this would be something I'd never ever recommend.  Last name is a hard coded required field, it can't be made non-required. If you don't have one the only ways you could do it would be to give everyone the same generic last name or have the last name and first name be the same thing, like Mr. Matt Matt. When we collect email addresses we always make sure that we get the first name and last name from an individual.

John Heizer

A same generic last name and no other information on the record would probably make all those records show up in a Duplicate report.  ☹

Matthew Nareff

I agree that it would screw up reports with a generic last name. And it would be the same if you made first and last the same.  That’s why I would never do or recommend it.  To be honest after I wrote this continued to bother me all day.  As a database manager I would be horrified if I walked in to a job and saw this, it would cause such a mess to deal with to get accurate info from your database.

Dariel Dixon 2

 

This sounds like a big NO GO.  There's no way to verify those records, unless the person consistently uses the same email address.  If they use another email address once, there's no way to tie it back to the original record.  I can't even think of what constituency you would give for these records.


I would never create a record for a person if I can't comfortably verify against a potential duplicate.  Name and email address just aren't good enough.

 

Don Irwin

This is a tough dilemma! Unfortunately, I think the best solution will continue to involve maintaining separate databases. In our case, we use Mailchimp for all of our email marketing. It is made for handling all of these email-related questions in a way that our donor database is not. We have some processes set up to manage how records are updated in both directions, and we maintain that separation for incomplete records (if we only have first name and email, they only live in Mailchimp).