Selected Archives of Volunteer Monitoring Listserv Discussions

From: Kris Stepenuck <kris.stepenuck@ces.uwex.edu>
Subject: [Databases] cost-benefit of online databases?

First, thanks to many who offered tips about planning an online database. A summary of responses will be included in an upcoming fact sheet about developing online databases.

Second, another question for those of you with online databases...Have you found that between educating people about how to use your online database for data entry, sending password reminders, quality checking the data that have been entered to the system, and doing other ongoing maintenance with the database that costs are outweighing the benefits of having data entry online? (In other words, would it be easier to have a staff person in your program manually enter the data once it's sent in to you? -It could still be available online for searching, just that it would be entered to the database internally vs. externally.)

Thanks so much for your thoughts!

Kris

Kris Stepenuck
WI Volunteer Stream Monitoring Coordinator and staff on Volunteer Water
Monitoring National Facilitation Project
UW-Extension and WI Department of Natural Resources
210 Hiram Smith Hall
1545 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1289
Phone: 608-265-3887
Fax: 608-262-2031
http://clean-water.uwex.edu/wav
http://www.usawaterquality.org/volunteer

From: William Deutsch <deutswg@auburn.edu>
Subject: Re: [CSREESVolMon] cost-benefit of online databases?
To: kris.stepenuck@ces.uwex.edu

Kris,

Regarding your question below, it's my opinion that, now that the pain of developing and trouble-shooting is over, there is overwhelming benefit to our online database. It's impossible to imagine our program without it, because of the financial savings in our office and the motivation this gives to the monitors. We're coming up on 90% of all data entered online. That and our 30 volunteer trainers are what keeps us going with declining 319 funding.

From: Jacob Apodaca <Jacob.Apodaca@lcra.org>

Kris,

We just started our on-line data entry at the Colorado River Watch Network in Austin, Texas in November and had %80 of our monitors use the on-line option.

We review all submitted data before the data goes live on our interactive map. Here is a link to our map http://crwn.lcra.org/.

Please feel free to visit our website at http://www.lcra.org/water/crwn.html. Let us know if you have any
questions.

So far, we are extremely happy with our on-line data option. It has cut down on the time we spend entering data, and it seems our monitors enjoy entering the data themselves. It gives them a feeling of being more involved with the program.

The benefits have far out weighed the costs.

Our database administrator is willing to share the code he used to put our on-line data option together.

Thank you.

Jacob Daniel Apodaca
Program Coordinator
Colorado River Watch Network
Lower Colorado River Authority
http://www.lcra.org/water/crwn.html

(512) 473-3333 Ext. 7859
1-800-776-5272 Ext. 7859
Mobile: (512) 731-0269
Fax: (512) 473-3390

I don't think the costs outweigh the benefits but there are costs. You have to be aware of that. We don't use a password for our data entry so we don't have that problem. We don't quality check as often as we ought to which maybe we would be better about if we were entering it ourselves. About half our monitors send us the hard data to enter anyway (they are not computer capable). The ones who enter it seem to be pretty reliable - we don't often find errors. I guess to a large extent it depends on what you do with the data and we are not doing anything really critical with ours.

The thing to me about the online database is despite your time (is it more than doing it yourself) it enables the volunteers. Some of them don't want to be enabled that way and you cannot force them but for those that do I think there is a value-added component that is hard to measure but is worth something! And when you come down to it the time spent either way is probably a wash for most groups. Either they entered it and you have to do QA/QC or you enter it. But if they enter it there is the added benefit that they feel more involved, they have an extra ownership level. And assuming they enter it correctly the QA/QC level is no different really - it all comes down to whether their data is believable and that doesnt change no matter who entered it. So actually their entering it saves you some time because you have to do the "can i trust these numbers" question either way. I do find that we do that up front if we receive the data and enter it ourselves whereas we put it off if they are entering it online.