As I had mentioned before data integrity was one of the biggest challenges for the Latina center. This wonderful nonprofit is hands-on in helping the community, unfortunately key information such as contact information for participants isn’t captured consistently. However, the importance of tracking contacts is indispensable to measure the progress of each participant and the success of the program, so in turn they can report out to donors their successes.
I have been working with their contact information for the past week. With the intent to capture valuable information of each participant, but again this data is incomplete. This is where Salesforce will benefit the Latina Center, helping track the progress of each participant. I have been working on the data ‘clean-up’ before loading into Salesforce. I have encountered unreliable data, spreadsheets are full of empty fields, contacts with only one name, missing phone numbers, contacts with only a phone number or email, etc. Thankfully Michele recommended Apsona, an application from the Salesforce app exchange, which is free for nonprofits – thanks Apsona. This application is a data management tool that can be used to clean and import data into Salesforce. Apsona extends what you can do in Salesforce and gives you full control of your data. Apsona helped a lot to clean the messy data. If there are missing fields Apsona will separate them and then ask you if you still want to import contacts with missing fields. This Application has become my best friend in data management. Data management is only the start of the project, but its one of the most important ones and this might take most of the 120hrs that were originally funded!