The Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in human and animal health, has cleansed and de-duplicated its contact database with the help of Transoft, removing 13% of its data as duplicates.

Alastair Reid, Project Manager at The Wellcome Trust, comments: “Transoft provided a high quality, repeatable set of processes that removed the 13% of our data that was duplicated, and ensured our complex data cleansing requirements were met. This has led to increased trust in our data, an uptake in the number of staff wanting to use it, and improved relationship management with stakeholders. This wasn’t just a one-off project for us, we now have the tools and capabilities to ensure our data is kept clean on an ongoing basis, with all the associated benefits.”

Linda Trafford, Database Administrator at The Wellcome Trust agrees: “The improvement to the quality of the data is significant, and allows users to have much greater confidence in their communication with our contacts. We are now saving a lot of user time, and the data is far more satisfying to work with. It is a joy to type in a university name and only have one record appear!”

The Trust database is maintained by the IRIS NFP CARE product, and records details of all contacts and communications. Data comes into CARE from many different sources, both external and from different systems throughout the organisation. The organisation was experiencing some issues with duplication of contact records and out-of-date and inconsistent addresses.

Transoft started with a workshop to establish the Trust’s exact requirements and to capture the data cleansing rules for the project. Transoft DBIntegrate was then used to create a consistent set of processes to undertake each task. As this was a very complex data cleansing exercise due to the nature of the data, a number of test updates of the CARE database were provided to iteratively remove any further inconsistences until the live database was updated. This final stage took place over a weekend to ensure minimal downtime of operations. 17,000 duplicated contacts, 13,000 duplicated addresses and 22,000 duplicated contact positions had been removed.

Geoff Baker, General Manager at Transoft sums up: “Successful projects, like our engagement with The Wellcome Trust, demonstrate the value of cleansing an organisation’s data.  Improving the effectiveness of communication with people outside of the organisation delivers much greater value from a marketing budget and helps support continued growth.“

Transoft DBIntegrate is a complete data quality platform enabling iterative development of repeatable and highly configurable rules. It provides real-time access to multiple data sources, enabling flexible, repeatable, automated data migration and data cleansing. It also offers data integration with optimized real-time read/write access to data across all sources, plus fast, configurable data warehousing.

Further Information

Transoft
Helen Beech
Marketing Manager
Tel: 01753 778000
Email: HBeech@transoft.com

Further information (external website)