Innovative Success Story: National Association of Home Builders

NAHB Database Cleanup Morethan Pays for Itself

Founded in 1942, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) is a federation of more than 800 state and local builders associations throughout the United States. Based in Washington, D.C., this trade association seeks to enhance the climate for housing and the building industry and to promote policies that will keep housing a national priority.

NAHB provides a wide range of services to help state and local associations, individual members, and member companies gain the advantage in a very competitive business environment. The organization also represents the industry’s interests on Capitol Hill and strives to ensure that housing remains a national priority when laws are made and policies are established.

Business Objective
Over the last 14 years, NAHB has grown significantly — from 151,848 member companies and 1.1 million individual members in 1987 to 203,000 member companies representing 1.7 million individual members in 2000. As membership grew, NAHB increasingly used its database to facilitate direct contact with members.

With the rapid increase in the number of new member records, NAHB’s existing FoxPro® database became corrupted with duplicated and flawed information. Without the ability to routinely cleanse the files, NAHB sent many erroneous mailings, costing the organization tens of thousands of dollars each month.

“Besides the hard costs associated with undeliverable and duplicate mailings, there were the intangible costs,” said Keith Mortier, staff vice president of plans and development at NAHB. “If a mailing soliciting financial contributions didn’t reach a substantial percentage of our members, or if we were unable to contact members on the spur of the moment to rally around an important piece of legislation, how much more had we really lost? That’s what we were looking at.”

Another issue: NAHB members can hold multiple memberships in local associations across the U.S., paying dues in several locations. The FoxPro database could only view member companies by one local association at a time. With a consolidated view of all memberships held by a given member company, NAHB could launch proactive initiatives, such as additional member services and new-member recruitment programs to support the efforts of state and local associations.

Technology Challenge
To improve communication with members and reduce mailing costs, NAHB decided to invest in a major database overhaul.

The first phase of this three-part project involved cleansing, matching and consolidating 500,000 member records before migrating them from the FoxPro database, residing on a Windows NT platform, to an interim Oracle database, also on a Windows NT platform.

NAHB technical personnel had just 90 days to accomplish this mission-critical task, although they had neither the time nor the resources to become data quality experts themselves.

“In order to meet our aggressive deadline, the database administrators needed to focus on building databases, not data quality tools,”
said Mortier.

Selection Criteria
The NAHB team overwhelmingly selected Innovative Systems, Inc. because of its 37-year history in data quality management and its proven track record built on thousands of implementations in more than 30 countries. Just as important, ISI’s software could perform the data quality functions necessary for completing all three phases of the project.

Due to its time constraints, the group especially appreciated the depth of experience offered by ISI’s staff and the user-friendly nature of the tools, both of which would allow them to forego extensive training and save time.

“Right from the start, we were very impressed with Innovative Systems. In our first meeting, Rich Olshefski [ISI Director of Professional Services] quickly understood our needs. Drawing on his industry expertise, he was able to scope the project and recommend the necessary data quality and matching reports that same day. Other data quality vendors and their offerings simply paled in comparison,” said Mortier.

The Innovative Solution
In Phase 1 of the project, NAHB utilized the following ISI products and services: Data Diagnostics, Data Quality, and Data Linking (both individual and corporate).
ISI’s Data Diagnostic Service identified the extent of the data quality problem, quickly and efficiently. Based on the findings, ISI recommended a course of action for product acquisition
and implementation.

NAHB next applied ISI’s Data Quality capability, with its built-in 2.5-million word and 100,000+ word-pattern knowledgebase, to speed identification and correction of name and address errors, anomalies and misspellings in member records. The Data Linking capability identified potentially duplicate individual records, in spite of misspellings, character transpositions and missing entries. It also linked each corporate entity to the various state and local associations in which it maintained memberships.

According to Mortier, the strength of the ISI solution was the granular level of detail for data cleansing and matching. Most of the business rules needed for data quality processing were already built into all three ISI products, saving NAHB the time and expense of hand coding.

Once the solutions were in production, ISI’s Data Diagnostic Service was again employed to benchmark data quality.

Results
The NAHB team met their 90-day deadline for completing Phase 1, while considerably improving the data quality of members’ information. According to the second Data Diagnostic audit, NAHB member records are now 98 percent accurate, up from 88 percent. The duplicate rate was reduced from 9 percent to 1.7 percent, and name-related errors were cut in half — from 3 percent to 1.5 percent.

In the 12 months following completion of Phase 1, Mortier estimates that the organization has already saved $170,000 in postage by reducing duplicate and incorrectly addressed mailings. The ISI implementation also resulted in NAHB modifying its business processes to capture and maintain cleaner member data.

“ISI’s software has already paid for itself, just in the savings on postage. Now that we have a national view of each member company, we can really take our organization to the next level,” said Mortier. “While results are critical, the process is important, too. And the ISI team really made the process smooth and worry-free. They worked side by side with my group and offered a wealth of knowledge that we could not have acquired on our own.”

Future Plans
With the migration of member records from FoxPro to Oracle now complete, the NAHB team has started laying the groundwork for Phase 2: the transfer of information from the Oracle database to its final storage place, the Association Management System.

While the first phase of the project focused on essential member information only, the second phase will utilize ISI’s toolset in batch mode for cleansing and matching data at higher levels. This will enable NAHB to track trends and model potential revenue scenarios by altering different variables.

In Phase 3, NAHB will add ISI’s online Change Management capability to maintain the integrity of data housed in the Association Management System, in real time. As users enter data into the database, the Change Management capability will notify them immediately of potential errors or duplicates in member information.

“ISI provides a true infrastructure solution to data quality management that our organization will continue to use for many years to come,” said Mortier. “We couldn’t be more pleased with the partnership

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