My time at the National Mississippi River Museum was a great learning

experience fill with many challenges. My official role was development intern, but

instead of the standard tasks assigned to that position I was given the task of

developing their database. My background in computers and previous classes taken at

Loras allowed me to take on a more technical role for the museum. Database

development includes tasks such as data entry, writing queries, scrubbing dirty data,

pulling reports, and data cleanup. The National Mississippi River Museum uses

Blackbaud’s database system Altru which is a popular system in the industry. My first

task would be to learn what Missy and Vicky already knew about the system and then

use my technical background to go one step further and earn more about the systems

capabilities than Vicky and Missy knew. I started by reading through various support

documentation to learn about the various tools and capabilities of Altru. Once I had a

grasp on the systems potential I went on to test what aid had learned. I did this by going

through and creating temporary test data in the database so I could get a feel for how

the system works and how different pieces of a data set relate to one another. Because

I was learning in a live database I wanted to ensure I did not do anything damaging as I

was playing around learning the system. So I committed to watching various masters

workshop videos on Altru in order to gain a working understanding of the more complex

features such as queries, export definitions, global change, and batch import.

After I had a good grasp on how to use Altru I began writing queries for various

reports that Vicky and Missy needed for upcoming events. These would sometimes be a

specific list of constituents that have registered for an event. Most times I am able to get

a general query developed quickly and then we would go through the report to look for
inconsistencies such as people who should be on the report that are not and people that

are on the report that should not be or have duplicates. This is where things would get

more challenging as I would have to look at new ways on interpreting the data to get the

most accurate and trustworthy report possible. One of the issues we would have with

the trustworthiness of a report would be because of all the dirty data in the system. The

database has been merges, transferred and split up multiple times, so there are many

old entries that the way the information has been recorded is different that the way the

current system records and evaluates that same information. I began to develop

different queries for data cleanup processes. The initial one was for constituents who

are not organizations but have the same first and last name. There was a chunk of data

where organizations had gotten duplicated as individual constituents and they contained

no valuable information. So we needed to delete them from the database, and there

were two ways to go about it. Either go through and delete each record individually and

there were over 500 records, or use the global change tool to perform a mass delete

based on the query I had written. I initially wanted to use the global change method, but

I did not have access to such a powerful tool, and as it turned out neither did Missy and

Vicky. There is a good reason for this, as the global change tool has the power to

completely wipe the entire database if misused. So we decided to not use that method

unless it is absolutely necessary or we have backups in place for potential mistakes.

Towards the end of the internship I began working on donations reports. These reports

are very important as some of the funding the organization receives is called a matching

gift where the Museum has to raise a specific amount in order to receive the matching

donations. The River of Innovation fund is one of the current projects the museum is
raising money for. So I developed queries that pulls in all the funds that have been

donated that can be attached to the Rover of Innovation project. This allows the

museum to accurately track their progress and prove to donors that they are on track to

succeed.

Being a part of a non-profit organization was a new experience for me, and I

found it to be very rewarding. The experience has really influenced what I am looking for

in future job roles. I really enjoyed getting to work with volunteers at events and be

actively giving to the community. On top of the job being rewarding, it has also been a

valuable learning experience as it is not common to get experience working with a

database without prior experience. So getting to work in Altru has set me up to continue

working in databases should I choose that path within the I.T. workforce.