Technical Expertise
Database Consulting
What is Database Consulting?
Database consulting involves using our experience of working with data and our knowledge of your program/agency, policies, and systems to provide recommendations about the best information to collect in order to measure your agency’s processes and outcomes. NPC staff have a wide variety of experience to aid you or your database developer to create the best possible data collection platforms.
NPC’s Approach to Database Consulting:
NPC uses its expertise in program evaluation. data collection and data analysis to advise clients on the most appropriate information to collect in order to measure the outcomes of interest. Our staff will work closely with you to understand your needs and then assist you and/or your database developer in producing the most useful product for you. We can provide assistance at many different levels of database development. If your agency does not currently use a database, we can work with your database developer to ensure it is set up correctly from the beginning. If your agency currently uses a database, we can review your database design and provide suggestions for enhancements to better meet your needs. This ensures the best possible data are collected in the best possible format to best meet your reporting and analysis needs. In addition, we have expertise in creating user manuals and facilitating database trainings for staff accessing your database. Our aim is to make sure that your agency’s hard work collecting data will pay off. Our experience from initial data collection procedures to database implementation can help you avoid common pitfalls that at best create difficulties and at worst render data unreliable or unusable—a costly error. The areas in which our expertise can assist you in database development include (but are not limited to):
- Helping you define minimum information needed for successful reporting of your processes and outcomes
- Providing suggestions on the most appropriate format for the data collected (text fields, numeric fields, date fields, etc.) and ways to minimize data cleaning from data entry errors
- Helping you implement enhancements to improve your existing database
- Working with your database developer to assure that data collected from different sources can be easily joined for analyses
- Creating user manuals with easy to understand instructions for the novice database user
- Providing your database developer with the understanding needed for staff to create meaningful reports from the database
