What do you really need from your database? An assessment process should be designed to help organizers articulate their needs, first, and wish list second, without fretting about what is and is not possible, or easy to do. Start by figuring out what you need to track in your database, who needs to be able to access it, what kind of data each user need to be able to get from the database and how you plan to use that data. Then you can look at what you have come up with and make sure you get what you need.

These are the questions to start with: Organizational Description
What are your overall organizing goals?

Describe the primary organizing strategies or methods you use to achieve these goals:

What issues are most important to your organization?

Who are your key constituents? How are they organized?

What is the scale of your work? (check all that apply)
[ ] Neighborhood [ ] Town or City [ ] County [ ] State [ ] Regional [ ] Other: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

What are your current major campaigns?

How does your organization decide what your next campaign will be?

Infrastructure
These questions will help us figure out whether the database should live on a web server, a file server or a local machine. They are also important questions to help us figure out whether a database built in FileMaker, Access or PHP/MySQL will best meet your needs.
How many offices does your organization have?

Does every organizer have their own computer?

Should non-staff have access to the database? Under what circumstances?

What operating systems are in use in your office?
How many organizers & administrators who will need access to the database are using:
[ ] Linux Desktop [ ] Mac OSX [ ] Mac OS9 or earlier [ ] Windows 95 [ ] Windows 98, 2000 [ ] Windows XP

Does your office have a network and/or an internal server? Who maintains the network and the server? What operating system is running on your server?

Do you already own any database software?

Communication Profile Frequency of Communication: Who in your organization communicates with each of these groups using the following communication channels? How often? Indicate frequency using this scale: 0=Never 1=Infrequently 2=Monthly 3=Weekly 4=Daily

Communication Goals: Who should be communicating more regularly with each of these groups using these channels? What channels do you want /aim to utilize less frequently?
-2=Much Less Often -1=Less Often 0=Same 1=More Often 2=Much More Often

Information Needs
Most organizations use databases to track and share information within the organization about relationships that the organization has developed. Think about the different types of relationships your organization is developing membership, press, elected officials, and think about the information that you are tracking for each kind of relationships

The easiest question is:
*What information do you collect or need about everyone in your database? This should include things like email addresses, last names and phone numbers, but might also include children's ages, birth dates, were they ever on public assistance? List this out as thoroughly as possible, but only include data you collect or need about everyone in the database, reporters, staff people, members, allies Ñ everyone.

Then, for each relationship listed in the communications matrix, map out the answers to the following questions. This should be a group excercise, so before you start, figure out who in your organization needs to be present to define each type of relationship. Does your development director need to be present when you outline data you collect about membership? (probably, if that data goes into grant applications and reports). Do all of your organizers need to participate in the press contact discussion? (Probably not, but some of them might.) The bigger your organization the better odds that a different configurations of stakeholders will need to be present for each relationship.

We could give you a matrix for this, but the truth is that unless you are a one wo/man show, you will need to tape newsprint to the wall to get through this. For each relationship or type of contact you should start by writing out what all the data you already collect amounts to. Then, for each point of infomration (dues payments, issue areas ) answer each of the following questions:
*Who collects this data?
*When is the information collected?
*How do you use it?
*Where is the information stored (file cabinet, spread sheet, big pile of sticky notes on the bulletin board, someone's brain are all likely answers.)
*Who needs to access this information?
*Is this information sensitive or private? Unusually so?

What information are you not tracking that may be important to your organization? What do you need that you don't have now? For each point of information, you should be able to answer all or most of these questions in addition to the questions above:
*What do you need to collect?
*Why do you need this data?
*How will you use the information? Is it essential? nifty? Make sure that you distinguish between things you need and things that would just be interesting to know.
*Who should be collecting this data? Who has access to the information? Who should be responsible for getting it from the big bad world into the database?
*Who should be using this data?

Final Steps
Compile everything you have done, look it over, ask what is missing. Were there questions we didn't ask that you wanted to answer?