As North Point Ministries continues to move toward a new church management system, our team has aggressively been cleaning up our data. Two big clean up searches are; duplicate search and the uninvolved search.
The duplicate search uses our database to find people with the same last name and first name. It pulls them up side by side so I can investigate address, email address, spouse names etc… I can then easily move donations or groups information to the correct record and delete the duplicate.
The uninvolved search finds families that have not been involved for several years and those who have never donated. We go through the list, inspecting each record and delete those who meet the criteria. By doing these two major data queries, it enables us to delete hundreds of records.
In addition to clean up queries, we are also asking our staff to be mindful of their database work. We are reminding them to conduct a broad search(helping them not enter a duplicate) before entering new records, entering birthdays for children and youth, as well as, asking them to be careful when naming their new groups. It is important to North Point Ministries that we have more consistency among groups across campuses. All groups records need to have consistent and similar naming conventions. This will make report running much easier.
To any church looking for a new church management system, we highly recommend running a thorough cleanup of existing data before doing any data migrations. We believe it will make the migration go smoother, help the new CHMS look nice when we begin using it, as well as, provide more accurate numbers for reports.
July 13th, 2011 at 2:08 pm
We’re preparing to do the same thing in our
church right now, is there any possibility you could share the criteria you
used for deleting inactive profiles? It would be a huge help in moving our
process along.
July 19th, 2011 at 5:36 am
Casey, thanks for your question. We no longer delete Inactive people - we run a search to find out who has not been actively involved in the church in more than two years. If they are a Member we send them a letter to find out if they’ve moved from the area, are attending another church or need help getting involved. If they are a Regular Attender we move their record status to Inactive. We are moving toward having this process happen twice a year.