Data Metrics of Maintenance

Judith Raub

Good afternoon,


I was wondering if anyone had some dashboards / data metrics queries, etc. that you are willing to share.  The plan is to report on data health / contactable / complete records / etc. monthly to the Board and the President.  Can't seem to think this forward of how to get started.  I know I need to determine how many constituents (per const code) are able to be contacted by phone or email or mail, etc. Is it also possible to get past information to do comparisons or will I need to start now and do anticipated and achieved?  Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.  We have Raiser's Edge NXT; however, I live in the data view but can also use web view.  Again, any insight would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you for your time and assistance.

Aaron Rothberg

Hi Judith-


You seem to have two question there. One is about tracking contactable constituents and another about data maintenance. I've posted a screenshot of my data maintenance dashboards below. I'm not sure which past information you mean (you can get some historical data with start and end dates of certain values), but in general once you've fixed something there's no record it was previously broken so I think you'd want to track your own changes somewhere else. I have an Excel spreadsheet called Change Log on my desktop that I update every time I make global changes, delete records, fix records, etc...Six months from now I may run up against something weird in the database that I can't recall anything about and I use my change log to see if, when and why I might have changed something.


Below are my maintenance dashboards:




 

Tom Klimchak

We have lots of data maintenance queries, but we really only "report" on general contact numbers. What we report on seems to change with executive staff turn over, but here's a list of "database health" items we still regularly report on and make available to our division:


Alumni Records (Alum of Record)

Living Alumni

Contactable Alumni (Phone, Email OR Phone)

Solicitable Alumni

Emailable Alumni

Mailable Alumni

Phonable Alumni

Alumni with Business Info


We report both the raw number/count as well as the % of records, based on Living Alumni.  So we might list out 24,440 Emailable Alumni, and then also include 52% (of all Living Alumni)


Not sure if "Emailable", "Mailable" or "Phonable" are really words... but, eh, everyone seems to understand what we mean ?  

Dennis Ladnier

Judith, we track/measure many of the things mentioned by Aaron including a number of others such as 'Complete Record' (what we define as a good quality record). we also use a rolling 2 year rolling window (based on date the record was last updated).  All of these statics/counts are generated once/evening via a custom SQL script which updates a separate database which feeds our PowerBI reporting.  We found this method easier than trying to develop and review (daily) numerous RE dashboards.

Margaret Whitaker

Hi Dennis, what type of database do you use for your BI Power reporting feed?

Dennis Ladnier

Margaret, it's an SQL database - also use it as a mini data warehouse and other misc uses.