Empower your business with a customer contact database in Affidavits

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so everyone this is sarah would i'm the current and first program manager for the state of Kansas and I work for the office of the State Fire Marshal headquartered in Topeka Kansas and fans video is not necessarily about in furs or fire data or reports or anything it's something that nobody really told me would be such an integral part of what I do but looking back and I can't believe that I didn't really understand how important it was and that's contact databases and it's really hard to get the information to the people we need to get to if we don't have a good solid contact database and it's not updated if it's not well kept and if it's not easily accessible so about three and a half years ago was when I started and I had an Excel spreadsheet that was about ten years outdated and I had the lovely job of trying to figure out which fire departments for even still active who was still a fire chief or who was different and who was my contact for capers which is what we call in furs and Kansas and we found several years later after i had already made my own contact database is that different units in my own office had their own spreadsheets and they would update there's or i would update mine and then we wouldn't be updated among each other so it's kind of a mess and then the fire marshal said let's fix it so we did and now we have a shared contact database and i wanted to tell you that story so you understand why my contact database has a lot more than just in furs in it several different tags so i'll just give you a sneak peak in it it was built in access there are two reasons why I built it in access the first is I had access on hand and the second is I knew what to do so if I knew how to use access and that's what I had that's just what it wound up with so here's what it looks like when it first opens up I have a number of tables over here access is what we call a relational database software which is basically made up of spreadsheets that talk to each other through a linked field and all of these tables are linked through the FD ID because all of my fire departments have a unique fire department ID work so I have tables over here queries which I'll explain here in minutes and then I have forms and forms are basically making something pretty it's basically the difference between a paper in furs report and a spreadsheet of adverse data so the forum gives you a look at something very quickly and easily so this is what you see and these buttons down here that I'll start with email list those are all queries and what it does is it finds all the contacts or fire departments based on a set of criteria so like this email list is for fire chiefs only it only goes to somebody who's tag to fire chief from the fire department and then some fire departments we have multiple contacts considered a fire teeth because they have station Chiefs and then they've got a department supervisor weird setup but anyway it works for us and then we have an email list for in furs like I have we have different ones for like there's possible information code public education over here we've got the trumpet which is actually goes to every email address in our database it's our quarterly publication so all of these little email lists are basically queries and that's all this side over here queries are basically filters of your tables so that you can find something that you need specifically so when you first open it up the database is split into two sides there's the non fire department side that feels with all the companies and agencies we might need to maintain contact with those are like fire department no flag fire extinguisher testers school contacts we have all the USD s and they're all the superintendents and principals are there definitely definitely more the public education side and prevention side and even inspectors and then we have the fire department if we have an email and we don't know who is associated with we can actually search for an email we type it in here and then it goes and finds it for us but I think you hit view fire departments it brings you to screen I'm gonna extend this out here for now you can see more so this is basically a form like I said it just takes the data it makes it pretty and chunks it out and I've entered a bunch of test data here so at the top we have FB ID which is test sessions where it says the name testify Department County region and then I have added classification in here and that's the class of the city need that a fire department might protect so class 1 class 2 + 3 or a lot of times it's blank for the rural ones i have a mailing in a physical address it's not always the same of a city state zip i do maintain what somebody's using for their in first if you want to i suggested the current in first program manager it helps me as soon as somebody is calling me on the phone and they tell me a fire department name i'm coming to my database and i'm pulling them up and then i'm looking at one mole with less than I talk to them is even a contact that I have what software they have and we can speak the same language I have a department comments here those are general comments about the entire department something like I just created this department on for 25 or this department merge with another department on for 25 you know something about the entire department and I have what these are called sub forms and subforms are ways to add records to the original record so what this means is this add contact records associated with this fire department and they're all related using mass tid you can't actually see it here be in this table because I have FB ID hidden but when you add in a contact it's adding an FTT there as well so you can have multiple people for one fire department and it helps because you're not creating multiple fire department listings if you had an Excel spreadsheet you would have to add in a lot more columns or you would have to duplicate information down and this is where access shines because it lets you do one report for the fire department you can add in all the contact you mean quick and easy to do so I have the title of that contact name so that email and you keep additional emails in here some of my contacts have two emails and they want both of them to receive an email and then we have columns over here and these columns are actually the tags that generate the email lists that I just showed you previously if I put a why so I going to put a why in the trumpet that means that when I generate that list for trumpets this email will then show up so this test junior at Tess com is going to show up in the trumpet email the chief listing is actually based on the title itself there's no column for that I have notes every time I talk to a department or talk to a contact I add in a note I'll say like 425 2017 reset password gave new password and if it needs to follow for not open in lining because I'm the one to talk to them because we have multiple people using this database and then whoever I talked to just sister soon Junior and that way the next time I talk to them I can do how many times I'm helping them I can know if nobody's called me in a long time there's no back and forth over well I talk to you know I didn't talk to you I keep it here so people are always constantly surprised by the amount of information that I record whenever I talk to them if I do an appearance whether that's like a conference and open house give trainee anything like that so I provide a class and it says which class that is investigating I'm the main one who uses in our office but anybody could use it in our office and then I have data requests it's important for me to know how often I'm using somebodys data or how often a fire departments requested their own data and I've had a reporter requested data set from a particular fire department I record that here when was it requested why what did I give I also keep a copy of whatever spreadsheet or data was given in a special folder outside of this so I know exactly what was given but I try to keep here and it also at the end of the year allows me to look and see quickly how many data requests I had total so when it's time for me to have a yearly review i already have the stats here the same with notes and appearances that's really kind of double checks to help me know okay I've already done 15 of these classes but I haven't done you know I haven't even done in five of the other class so it really helps me know how many times I've talked to people so that's the setup for this and in the next video I'm going to show you how to actually make this one but I didn't want to get you too long in here just keep going through the playlist and you'll see you don't have to make it as shiny and pretty as I have but it's definitely made my life a lot easier there's nothing wrong with spreadsheets if you want to work in spreadsheets you do what you know and do what you can succeed