Streamlining Data Management for Full Moon Girls
Full Moon Girls is a nature awareness & feminine leadership mentoring program rooted in building meaningful relationship with self, each other, and place. Syncing up to a database will assist Full Moon Girls with managing contacts, handling online registration and merging contacts with communications channels – Mail Chimp, Email, and postal mail.
Currently, Full Moon Girls tracks contact information and does online registration & medical forms (using Google Forms and Sheets), and does mail merges (using Gmail and Autocrat) – making registrations and contact management painful and time consuming. Although our passions are in tracking animals, we spend many hours wrestling with technology to manage our data.
With the help of Hack for Western Mass, we would like to upgrade to a contact tracking system (a relational database) which will integrate our recordkeeping, marketing and registrations. We dream of easy-to-update online registration and simple management of contacts for mailing campaigns. Thanks for supporting us to do what we love and do best, being with the girls in out-of-doors.
This new contacts and registration database will make it easy:
- For parents of new participants to read & submit the online registration form.
- For returning families to update their own registration info seasonally.
- For staff to find and update individual registration forms seasonally.
- For staff to print roster w/ medical & liability info; print web-submitted registration forms easily.
- For staff to manage contacts by category (Friday, Saturday, Fall, Spring, Wise Women, Alumni, Supporters) in a format for email marketing (MailChimp) or postal mail campaigns.
Full Moon Girls will be able to offer more scholarships to girls of diverse backgrounds because we are able to spend less money on staff time for data management!
Full Moon Girls will also be able to dedicate time and resources to reaching out to girls in urban, low-income communities locally, like Springfield, Holyoke, and Chicopee.
Primary equipment used by Parents/guardians of participants (data entry): pc & mac laptops, occasional mobile device use. Needs to be accessible to folks with lower-level technology competencies.
Primary equipment used by Staff of Full Moon Girls (data entry + management): pc & mac laptops, occasional mobile device use. Several staff have competency with tasks such as mail-merge, and quick-learning and problem-solving with new tasks. Some with lower-level competency.
Proposed Implementation process:
- Evaluate & select best free data/contact management system. Podio (preferred)? Creator.ifreetools.com? OBVIbase.com? Camp management? Other CRM/SIS system?
- Create online database. (No programming skills required for maintenance.)
- Import data: existing system → new system.
- Rework online registration form into easily updateable multipart web form.
- Create data summary tools to turn raw data into roster and contact lists.
- Test, tweak, utilize!
Existing online registration form (Google Forms), http://goo.gl/forms/l6hRcqFcTF Template for Roster w/ medical info (Google Forms), Template for full database record display that only staff see, A way for parents to login and update their girls’ registration records on the web.
Who has this data now, or how can it be found or crowdsourced? Client, Full Moon Girls founder Dhyana Miller – PC laptop, & Google Drive Online (Google Sheets and Google Forms) Also online at http://www.vermontwildernessschool.org/full-moon-girls/
Our hacker friends’ brains 😉
Add new comment