Contact databases - a practical guide to planning, developing, purchasing and making them work for you

Tuesday 16 May 2006: central London

Techical topics

In reponse to feedback from the event held in February, we are introducing this opportunity to ask technical questions and hear about some of the options and issues. The topics currently planned (with a rough indication of their content) are:

What could a database do for you?
This is for those who want to know what features to look out for in a database, what they do, and why some things are harder to achieve than others. A live demonstration may be possible.

Introduced by: Kate Mansell & Sarah Chadwick

The expensive end of the market
A review of some of the main providers of contact databases. (Live demonstrations will not be possible.)

Introduced by: Paul Ticher

Cheap options: what if you can only afford a few hundred pounds?
A look at how much you can do without a database at all, using office software such as spreadsheets, and where to go next when a spreadsheet is no longer enough.

Introduced by: Simon Davey

Open source: what is available?
One of the current hot topics. Open source is attractive to many in the voluntary sector. Find out why, and what is available in the way of contact databases.

Introduced by: Dave Nichols and/or Chris Bailey

Profiling the voluntary sector: how to describe organisations in your database
A perennial problem for voluntary organisations is how to categorise other voluntary organisations when you want to build a profile of the sector in your area, or even just to share or compare data between databases. The Audit Commission has just produced guidance, based on extensive piloting, on how to find out what's there, and how to describe the organisations you find.

Introduced by: Emma Whittlesea
 
For the purposes of this conference, the Data Controller is Paul Ticher. He can be contacted at 22 Stoughton Drive North, Leicester LE5 UB, on 0116 273 8191 or by .