Who's who and what's what!

No matter what kind of organization you are running it doubtless has many relationships – with members, suppliers, prospects, staff, volunteers and so on. The Bridgelin Data Management module (aka DMS) represents a unique and innovative way to manage the people and organizations in your sphere - in a way that better reflects reality and the mulitude of relationships we all. It is also the foundation for other backend modules, both standard and custom.

How It Works

The DMS is integrated with the Directory and the Email List in order to eliminate any duplication of effort. It also forms the foundation of the Membership Management module with the same result.

There are three main components to this database

• organizations
• individuals
• connections

Organizations

Organizations refers to any number of entities including, businesses, not-for-profits, charities, groups, committees and so on. Some of the information (the Public Info) is shared with the Directory Listing while everything else is private and exclusive to your domain.

There are a number of standard fields as well as custom fields that can be added at any time.

There is a table view with search and filter functions, including Tags, as well as a detail view for each Organization.

Individuals

Individuals are people, and because they are different than Organizations, we treat them a little differently. While the overall structure and functionality is much the same, the data fields are not quite the same, such things as salutation, gender, first and last name – that sort of thing. It's subtle but important.

Connections

This is the real secret sauce. We realized that there can be many connections between Organizations and Individuals and so designed the system to reflect that reality. So rather than a linear system we built one that is more in line with a social graph. In this way you can immediately view all the connections any one Organization or Individual might have.