As some of you may know, there has been some transition at Boston Neighborhood Network (BNN) as of late, and they hired me to help get their OMP site launched. There is actually quite a bit left to do on the site, and I also have to work when their budget allows, which is why you haven't seen things take off at lightning speed on this one. It is looking like things will be fully running by sometime this summer.
For now, the concentration has been on data cleanup. Most of the data that has been previously imported to their system, including the entire Facil import, turns out to be garbage. Instead of importing each series as a project and then individual shows within that project, all individual shows were imported as separate projects, essentially leaving thousands of duplicates. On top of this, this import was done about a year ago at which point Facil was abandoned but no one was trained on how to use Drupal/Civi to manage membership. Thus, for the past year a multitude of Excel spreadsheets have gathered, member information (largely email addresses) have changed, and things have spiraled out of control. To clean this up, I've had to do the following:
- Remove all show and project information from the system
- Expire all existing memberships in the system (over 2000 were imported but no expiration date was included)
- Import up-to-date contact information for all members. In order to get this done duplicates had to first be parsed (hundreds of these). Ensure that there is only one record for each member as membership import would need to be tied to email addresses (still about 18 where an email was used across multiple individuals).
- Set up generic emails for about 50 members where they don't exist (again, so we can attach membership appropriately).
- Import current member information (approximately 400 members) and tie them to contacts.
All of this has been done. Next step is for staff to get the correct member email associated with each project so those can be reimported. That will be taking place over the next week.
Today we have a training scheduled for the key staff members to fix the remained 18 email dupes, learn how to manually create membership, and generally use Civi. As of today all new member information will be tracked only in Civi. Once the projects are in we'll have another training on that, and all new projects will be originated in the system. From there, we can finally move to TRMS integration and MERCI.
See you all on IRC.