Open source media contacts/relations database suggestions?

December 14, 2006 4:46 PM

I'm looking for a free (or nearly) solution for storing an existing list of media contacts.

I work at a pretty large nonprofit in the communications department. My boss has asked my cohort to design an Access database to store all of our media contacts; name, organization, beat, language, community served, etc. As I have extensive database implementation experience and she does not, my cohort has been asking me for design advice, which I've gladly given. But it seems to me that there should be some free solution out there.

To be clear, we're not looking for a free list of media contacts -- we're looking for a preexisting framework in which to plug in our own contacts (up to 350,000), and keep them organized. In an ideal world, we'd also like to have automated batch faxes or emails, the ability to track our interactions with journalists, article storage, and editorial calendars.

My google-fu has netted nuthin'. Perhaps it is presumptuous to think that such capabilities can be had for free. However, when I look at solutions such as Bacon's or Contacts on Tap, the main selling point seems to be the contacts themselves, not the database in which they're stored. It seems possible that someone has a solution that doesn't involve the list.

Note: I've seen this, and the question is geared towards the list, not the software. Also, cheap solutions are also encouraged.

Thanks!

posted by Pacrand to Technology (2 answers total)

Open source != free, as in beer. The fact that something is built using platform tools such as LAMP, and released with source code, doesn't mean it isn't, or shouldn't be a commercial product.

Quite frankly, the largest private contact management database I ever worked with was about 42,000 records, mostly of people and organizations in a relatively staid manufacturing industry, where there wasn't a tremendous amount of turnover. We handled it in DB2, but it was a tough, tough job for what amounted to 2 FTEs administrators, augmented by various Marketing and Sales drones as project labor on specific projects. The business aim was to have the database "95% accurate," but it was a constant battle keeping it up to date, and I know from some projects, such as those involving titles, that the resource approached nowhere near that desired accuracy.

Just maintaining the database for hierarchial changes in the target organizations was a substantial effort. Whenever a target organization merged, divested, or reorganized, hundreds to thousands of records would quickly need to be updated "automatically," or relinked via updated indexes or logical views. Projects such as bulk mailings, which generated at least some returns and non-deliverables were another constant source of change administration, but these were frankly pretty haphazard. Many organizations continue to accept mail for individuals long gone, forever, so you'll get no purge signal from something as simple as repeated non-deliverables. Same for e-mail addresses, phone numbers, etc. In the long run, I found that the flexibility and robustness of maintenance functions was far more important to the success of the effort, than any other factor. In use, 90% of what we could do that was revenue affecting for the business, was a result of how we could verify and update the information in the database, and about 10% was related to getting information into or out of the database, thanks to the power and sophistication of SQL tools. Query is no big deal these days for any RDBMS based product, but maintenance functions can't be slick or extensible enough.

So when I see you asking about products to maintain a 350,000 contact database, I'm wondering what your conception of sophistication is, concerning organization heirarchy, maintenance issues, response times, user drive effort, etc., because from my experience, I see something this size as being at the top end of capabilities for most commercial solutions, much less open source projects releasing free (as in beer) products.

That said, the Google search string "MySQL contact manager" yields lots of hits, some of which might be worth exploring, as they are MySQL commercial reference customers. If I were you, I might call up Mike Rosen at NEC, and others like him, and have a chat about what commercial or freeware products or internal development products are being used to manage contact data in their organizations.
posted by paulsc at 7:42 PM on December 14, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks, Paul. I'm fully aware of the complexity of such a solution; I should have noted that such lofty goals came from my management, which threw out that number from out of nowhere. In reality, we have about 1,000 contacts, and want to grow, but nowhere near that HUGE number.

I agree that complexity should and often does comes with a price. Thanks for the info!
posted by Pacrand at 10:59 AM on December 15, 2006