Staying in touch with FOVEC's members and friends is essential to everything we do. Email continues to be the single most effective way to reach most people, so we must be careful to have the correct email information on file and not email people who have asked us not to.
Because people contact us through several different channels (this website, Facebook, email, text, messenger, etc.), we often get multiple records for the same person. While there is no way to avoid this, we can minimize the problems and effort if we agree on the following:
Google Contacts in our FOVEC2011 account is our Golden (primary) copy, i.e., the place where we consolidate contact information and correct it.
Our Wave, Wix, and Mailchimp accounts all need to be exported from time to time into Google Contacts using the right labels to track where the contacts came from and how they should be used.
This contact information should be considered confidential and limited to Board members.
Today I merged the contacts from Wave, Wix, and Mailchimp with our Google contacts creating new labels for each source. I would like to try using this Forum to agree on how we enter information and manage each of these databases.
For example:
Avoid entering contacts as two or more people. If both are active create a contact for each person, otherwise list one as the partner.
If we include a business as a contact put the business name in the first name and put Business in the last name so it is easy to sort them from people.
If we have an email that we want to keep but not the person's full name fill in as much as possible and put TBD so we can easily search for them.