Happy New Year! I’m your low-level admin with a career in inventory and data management who’s been tapped to assess the health of the membership database. As many of you know, earlier this year, we switched systems which meant migrating decades of data into a new format. This was necessary as our membership has grown to such an extent that hand-stuffing envelopes for new and renewing members were becoming unsustainable – a good problem to have and one the association has been eager to overcome.

During that transition, it appears that a significant number of mailing addresses were dropped, which is part of the reason for the delay in all shipments. For the last two weeks, I have been investigating and scraping original backups and previous mailing lists to merge what data could be salvaged. From that data, we were able to resolve the majority of addresses but not all.

Of our roughly 4000 paid members, close to 3000 addresses have been corrected in that time.

It is urgent to us that we resume shipping as soon as possible; mailing lists have been submitted to the mailing house for both calendars and outstanding membership packages.

Because of the massive amount of back and forth with the database, as well as scraping what may be out-of-date information from previous lists, I still urge all members to pop in and confirm that their mailing address is correct. With big data moves, there’s always an opportunity for a small amount of overlap – perhaps you updated during a time we’d turned the database off for a large import, or perhaps it’s possible it was accidentally overwritten with old data – while I worked very diligently to prevent this, I’d rather everyone took a peek to ensure they’ll be getting their packages to the correct address.

In the next couple of days, you can expect to see an email from me or the team confirming whether your calendar or membership package has shipped or if you were skipped on this batch because your mailing address was missing or errored. If you were skipped, I would be following up on another batch to the mailing house once folks have had a chance to log in and update as much as possible.

While I was not on board for the original transition, and I’m more or less here to get us over the hump, I am glad that I was able to determine a major roadblock in our service to our members and resolve it as much as I have. The association is run by volunteers, all of whom are eager to maintain your trust and our service to you. We look forward to resuming operations in a much more efficient format going forward.

Best wishes and happy trails for 2023!