Description

1. Database Description

 For this project, I’m designing an Emailing Fundraising Database that would immensely benefit my place of work. I work at a political consulting firm that, among other services, helps democratic political candidates fundraise through email blasts. At the moment, we do not have a central tracking system that chronicles all of the emails we send and the money that is raised per email across our clients. Although we sometimes have access to Excel files from individual campaign teams, at this time we do not have one database that aggregates all of the client data into a central location. Unsurprisingly, this presents a challenge because we often want to better understand our return on investment across the board, but we do not have all of the data in one place.

That is why I want to create a large database that tracks the emails written and money raised across all of our political clients. This way, we can query to find exact information about a particular candidate, while we can also aggregate data to examine macro-level trends on our average performance. My database will allow my team to determine which of our email efforts are most effective in successfully soliciting donations, and which ones we should not repeat. Although we’re a private firm, this database will serve a public-sector purpose because our email efforts are designed to get progressive candidates elected (which in my opinion is a very good thing!). Email campaigns have the highest return on investment of any marketing channel, which is why better organizing our processes should help us win more elections. 1 

In creating my database, I hope to achieve the objectives of good design outlined by Hernandez in Database Design for Mere Mortals -- whose recommendations I leverage throughout my project. These objectives include: the database supports both required and ad hoc informational retrieval, the tables are constructed properly and efficiently, data integrity is imposed at the field, table, and relationship levels, the database supports business rules relevant to the organizational, and the database lends itself to future growth. I want to emulate this design because, as we’ve learned, garbage in 2 creates garbage out -- which is why carefully designing a database is so important.