Keeping it Clean
A key part to maintaining your data in Powerbase is to keep your data "clean" and up to date. Are you removing duplicate records periodically? Are you using a consistent format when entering street addresses? Are you removing or fixing bad emails after sending email blasts? Cleaning your data entails having to review your data so that information is consistent and up to date by periodically updating your data as needed (monthly, after email blasts, after you've completed an workshop or event that used a PowerBase online registration event form, etc.).
Here are collection of tips to help you with database maintenance and cleanup tasks:
Managing your Email Lists
This document covers what you need to know keep your email list healthy with low rates of bounced emails and unsubscribes. See Managing Your Email Lists: Bounces, Holds, Unsubscribes
This screencast shows you how to find bad email addresses
This screencast shows you how to find people without email addresses
Keeping Addresses Consistent
If you need to do searches by address, it would be extremely helpful if addresses are entered in a consistent manner. The US Post Office uses a standard format that you can use as guideline for staff and volunteers to refer to when doing data entry, especially when using abbreviations for street suffixes (e.g. Street, Drive, Lane.) For searching purposes, you'll want to have an organizational agreement on whether you want to use abbreviations or the full name for a street suffix. Here's the USPS address format documentation known as Publication 98, which is helpful when doing bulk mailing. Here is the link to list of standard abbreviations for street suffixes
This screencast will show you how to find people that are missing addresses in PowerBase
Getting Rid of Duplicates and Useless Contacts
This screencast will show you how to use the dedupe feature to remove duplicate contacts from PowerBase
This resource describes a case study in how to remove useless contacts from PowerBase
Reconciling online credit card transaction in you payment processor with PowerBase
- As part of your bookkeeping tasks or part of your monthly bank statement reconciliation proces, you will also want to include reconciling that the transactions that were completed, pending, or incomplete in your payment processor are consistent with the payments recorded in PowerBase (e.g. for registrations, contributions,etc.).