Ohh, digitizing. Don’t you just love digitizing?

Yeah, maybe not.

Lately we’ve been helping customers digitize information — bookkeeping information, marketing information, inventory information, management information. Digitizing is a fancy way of describing data entry. But the scope is much bigger than simple data entry. If you design a database effectively, it will literally provide a structure that your business can use to improve decision making.

Businesses digitize information so that they can make better use of it. Digital databases have many advantages over other methods. The advantages include:

• Sharing information
• Storing information
• Analyzing information
• Reproducing information
• Monitoring and responding to dynamic information

If you don’t yet have any form of customer database, there are many books, software tools, and webpages available to guide you in developing one. Here’s an basic and useful set of notes to help you get started designing your customer or donor database.