We are a high school establishing a new database system,
for donors, PTA, and alumni.

In doing a needs assessment, I have a problem: we are just starting an
alumni association (school is only 15 years old) and don't have ANY
existing database (not even paper).

Does anybody have experience with an alumni database?

Thanks.

On May 30, 6:10 am, dapez <noem... (AT) nowhere123 (DOT) net> wrote:
just design it the way you would a business database. Start with an
ERD.
--- What are your entities?
you already have at lest three major ones: donors, PTA members,
alumni. Are there more generic entities (maybe a person)? are there
other entities?
--- what attributes do the entities have?
names, addresses (postal, email, other?), last donation?, graduation
date, (hint which attributes go to which entities?)
--- how are they related?
Are donors also alumni? Are PTA members alumni? do alumni have phones?
do PTA members have graduation dates?

When answering these questions, try to keep in mind what information
you need and how it is related.

After designing the ERD, you can begin to assign the information to
tables and perform the normalization process. For something like this
you should end up with a dozen tables or so. It should not be hard
once you decide what information you really need.

HTH,
ed

"dapez" <noemail (AT) nowhere123 (DOT) net> wrote

I once did some work for the alumni liaison office of a small university.
The administrative system was called BANNER. It was Oracle based. The part
the Alumni office used was a small portion of BANNER. One advantage over
using their own self contained system is that new alumni were fed in to
their database by other processes, like registration and graduation.