on monday 4th january, while most of the country was still on holiday, a group of us gathered at janet's for a database party. the purpose of this party was to learn how to use our shiny new CiviCRM online membership database. this is the system that we installed in conjunction with this new site, & already it's made a great improvement in how we manage all our contact information, and communicate with our members.

trustees madeline and janet were there, along with volunteers judith and stacey; and me. we started out by learning how to search for a member, then how to update their contact information, enter financial payments, and how to send them an email enquiring about a new address, if we'd received a return-to-sender letter back from them. in the process of doing this we also covered a few other topics.

CiviCRM is quite a complex system, as is Drupal (which is used both for this web site and the interface through which we can access the database) but once we've got the hang of the basics we can develop things from there and ultimately it will be a very useful tool for us all. both CiviCRM and Drupal are open source which means that there is a large user community contributing to the ongoing development of the software, rather than a small corporate making lots of money from it.

we will need several more database parties to be sure - to pass the knowledge on to the other trustees, and to build on what we learned on monday. monday's session was followed by a lovely potluck lunch in janet's sunny back garden, toasts to the new year, and general merriment and frivolity, an excellent reward after the morning of focused concentration at the keyboard.