Needles in the Haystacks

            Week 5, Tuesday June 5th and Wednesday June 6th, I continued working on the contact lists project in the database.  With the work I had completed the week before, all the contact lists had been gathered, formatted, and the duplicate lists had been deleted.  From this point, I uploaded these updated lists into the Patron Mail System.  This system is where all of the museums’, hopefully, up to date contacts are contained.  This system makes it easy and efficient for the museum to send out email blasts of coming exhibits, events, speakers, workshops, etc. 

            So what I did, to make the “updating” stage of the now organized contact lists easier, was to input the lists into the Patron Mail System.  Then I sent out a mock “e-blast,” to see which emails bounced back as “bad emails” or contacts who “opted out.”  The list I got back from Patron Mail was exhausting looking!  Out of roughly fourteen hundred emails, I got seven hundred and eighty two that bounced back on me.

            Next stage of the tedious process, I began the search for the needle in the haystack.  The list purely contained the bad emails.  There was no indication of which list the email was from, or the name of the person whom the contact belonged to.  So I basically had to go on a crazy hunt, through roughly twenty-five lists, each with hundreds of name, organizations, phone numbers, addresses, and emails, to find the bad emails and delete them. 

            Inputting the lists into Patron Mail took all of a half an hour.  It was the mad search for each needle in the valley of haystacks that consumed the rest of my week.     And the process would continue into my 6^th week on the job, but more on that when it comes.  This entire project is exhausting and obnoxious, to say the least, but in the long run, is type of work is what is key to making a non-profit not only thrive, but purely live.