Question

Photo of Arran France

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How are you ensuring your users' information is up to date?

1

Some information such as date of birth and baptism dates will never change but other data such as addresses, phone numbers, schools, and even names can change over time. Some users may be proactive in keeping that information up to date but others (particularly those on the edge) won't be so helpful.

What procedures do you have in place and how are you using Rock to maintain an accurate data set?

  • Photo of David Leigh

    0

    We have used a couple of approaches to try and address this problem at our church:

    1. Add a specific associated "Date" field for the information.
    For information that is time-sensitive, "stale" information can lead to mistakes of a very sensitive nature when dealing with people. We have encountered this problem at our church when collecting information about age. Some people (especially visitors) prefer to nominate an age group rather than providing a Date of Birth. Although this information is very useful when it is first acquired (especially for visitor follow-up), it becomes increasingly inaccurate over time. Instead of choosing not to collect this important piece of data, our approach has been to create an additional field, the "Age Group Assignment Date". it provides a good indication of how relevant the information is, and it can be easily queried in the future to determine which records require maintenance. We also use this method for tracking things such as Expiry Dates for legal ceritifications and other authorisations.

    2. Create exception reports to highlight outdated information.
    We use Data Views to filter for Person records that have not been updated recently and may need to be reviewed.
    At the moment, we use a combination of the "Last Save Date" and some of our custom assignment-date fields to do this, which is OK but not very satisfactory.
    It's on my To-Do list to     create a new Data Filter that will provide a "Last Activity Date" for a Person record by looking at all of their related information (Notes, Group Memberships, Person Record, etc) and determining when the Person last had any recorded activity - this will give us a clearer picture of people who need follow-up or have lost contact with the church.
    If anyone knows of an easy way to do this in Rock right now, I'd be very pleased to hear about it!

    Some of the pieces of information you mentioned are probably "self-correcting". Names, addresses and contact numbers are things that people tend to keep you updated about if they are interested in staying in contact with the church. If they don't, the problem is more about identifying when the person should be marked as "Inactive", which is where option (2.) is useful.