Royal Society of Arts case study

The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA) is based in London and was founded in 1754 to encourage the development of a principled and prosperous society.

Today it runs a programme of projects and lectures around five manifesto challenges: to encourage enterprise, move towards a zero waste society, foster resilient communities, develop a capable population, and advance global citizenship.

One of the many ways to expand your use of Progress is to merge another database into Progress to create a more complete view of your supporters. RSA has recently finished an extensive project to do just that and Mark Campbell, Database Administrator, explains why they undertook the project and how it went. They had been using Progress for almost 10 years to support the management of their Fellowship scheme when they decided to consolidate their databases.

"The need to merge our two core databases was first identified several years ago but remained just an idea until early 2004 when we first started to make concrete moves to get the process started.

"The main reason was that we had two databases with overlapping data sets used by different departments and maintained at different levels, so one department would know certain things about a constituent that the other didn't. We wanted to create an organisation-wide resource that brought all the disparate information into one place."

Their other database they considered was Raiser's Edge but Progress was chosen primarily because it was more heavily used and the data was more accurate. But also because there was a much higher level of knowledge about Progress among it's users with as much as ten years of use by some staff members. The project to merge the databases took approximately 15 months and was managed by a Project Manager who dealt with the communication between Fisk Brett and the RSA.

There were also two database administrators, one from each department, who organised the preparation of source data, worked together to define how the new system would work and took charge of testing the implementation process.

Mark explains the process RSA went through in those 15 months: "The cleaning and preparation of the source data began in March 2004 by the Database Administrators of both databases and continued through to March 2005.

"The administrators also made the decisions about the data transfer deciding what should go where and designed User Defined tabs to accommodate data that didn't fit in any existing tabs. We then created a test environment and recorded any issues and solutions. Key users were trained in late 2004 and we went live in May 2005."

Since going live the RSA are starting to enjoy the benefits of using one centralised system. "Our data is in one place so we are moving to a single coherent set of data on our constituents." says Mark. This means that they run less of a risk of duplication and inaccuracies and also benefit from maintaining and upgrading only one system.

Mark's tips for merging databases:

• Visit other Progress users and find out how they use Progress either as a centralised system or how they use it for the functionality that you plan to incorporate.
• Expect the process to take a while and there to be issues along the way that weren't considered before.
• Keep users informed and make sure they are fully briefed on the software functionality, the certainty of teething problems, and the need for consistent data management practices.
• Make communication between, and to, the user departments a priority. Each must understand how the other works and what they need from a system, that way you can create a solution that will work for all parties.

For more information on the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts see www.rsa.org.uk