A Program to Help Me?

October 21, 2009 10:13 AM

I started a new internship, and I'm wondering if there is some way to automate copying the non-profit information from this website.

So, I'm the new intern, and I've been charged with the task of copying the information from this website and copying the information from each member into an Excel spreadsheet. I need the name of the organization, contact name, their title, phone number, email, and the website address.

It's a little slow-going, and I'm happy to do it by hand, but I wonder if there isn't some way to automate the process, like with a program? My supervisor would be thrilled, but I don't know anything about programming. Before I post a request on a site like rentacoder, I need to know, is this even possible?

posted by moonroof to computers & internet (6 comments total)

This is about an hour of work for even a poorly skilled Perl guy like myself.
posted by bfranklin at 10:17 AM on October 21

I’ve been in precisely the situation you are in right now and I vote for you to just do this by hand. Assuming you're working 8 hours a day, you could have this done in 3 to 4 days.

Create a procedure, turn on some music if you can, and bang it all out.

Hiring a coder to do this stuff is kind of over-thinking it. Plus, it will rob you of the satisfaction of finishing a monumentally dull task and feeling as though you are paying your dues.
posted by pwally at 10:21 AM on October 21

consider it done! memail me an address to send this stuff to.
posted by soma lkzx at 10:38 AM on October 21 [3 favorites]

Sigh. Intern work. I would know. I have been doing stuff like this for three years.
If nothing else works, try contacting the Colorado Nonprofit Association themselves and ask if there's any way you could get that info in one place like a spreadsheet that they might have for internal use. Since, it's already public, they shouldn't have a problem. Just be professional and represent your firm. You don't even have to highlight the fact that you're an intern.
I was once asked to collect historical data on some esoteric municipal funds at my old job which would have taken me days of poring over individual emails, instead, I just contacted people who collected this and they sent me the data without asking any questions. The fact that I pretended to be doing this for the next three days while actually reading metafilter at work is another matter entirely.
posted by Lucubrator at 10:42 AM on October 21

Here you go:

http://paste2.org/followup/478671

It's CSV: copy and paste it into a plain text document (use Notepad or whatever), save it with a .csv extension and then open it in Excel.

Some of the cells will blank: this is where the website doesn't provide that particular bit of data.

Annoyingly, the website displays the contact name and their title together, separated only by comma. This meant I had to manually fix the rows for organizations where either the contact name or their title contains a column. I think I got them all right.
posted by kyten at 1:18 PM on October 21

Thanks MeFites! I showed the spreadsheet to my supervisor and she said it was "totally cool". We're moving on to the next part of the project weeks early!
posted by moonroof at 9:08 AM on October 22