Case Study: The creation and maintenance of a project provider database published online by DTI/DEFRA

The Climate Change Projects Office (CCPO) was established to raise awareness, offer advice and contribute to UK Government policy-making in relation to climate change projects, as well as supporting the business community by enabling it to find out about related Government activities and any available support.

As part of its support to business, CCPO also sought to bring together UK companies with climate change expertise and organisations looking to undertake projects in this specialised field. They therefore proposed the creation of an online database, which could be interrogated in order to identify suitable providers, using a wide range of selection criteria, such as particular climate change expertise, experience in the relevant part of the world, regions in which they had a presence on the ground, etc. ABC was invited to manage this resource, and to receive, validate and process all subsequent data being added to it.

There were however a few interesting ‘wrinkles’ with this project. The first is that CCPO wished to have two (overlapping) sets of data: one publicly-accessible, another accessible only by them (as a contacts/mailing or CRM database). Thus records needed to be flagged either as wholly public, private ie. inaccessible by the general public, or both. Records that were both meant that when viewed by CCPO they saw all the information for a given organisation, but when viewed by the public only certain fields were displayed. Second, since most of the CCPO team operated away from the office a large part of the time, they wished to be able to access data 24/7 from anywhere in the world, irrespective of whether they were in the office, working from home, or at a conference in Pitlochry or Pittsburgh. (To see this resource, click here. For optimum category results choose from the first 10 categories; for an existing database entry, try 100523. Note that data is not current, and that only public records may be displayed.)

Every public record had a primary and a secondary named contact (with up to 10 contact names for private records). It goes without saying that data on individuals was linked to their organisation, rather than there simply being a record for every individual — thus avoiding multiple occurrences of the same organisation throughout the database. To further maintain the integrity of the database, all new records and amendments were vetted, first by us, then by CCPO, ensuring on the one hand that data was properly structured, with valid postcodes, phone numbers etc; and on the other that it was not just an advertising ‘puff’. To further improve data quality, data subjects were contacted by e-mail during the life of the database to ensure a) that they wished to remain listed; and b) that their details were still up-to-date. This took the form of directing them to a web page showing their (public) content and inviting them to propose any amendments necessary.

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