Political Action and Communication System:

The 1199 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) consists of a central organization with approximately 39 satellite local organizations, or locals. It is the largest healthcare union in the United States.

Each of these 39 locals operates independently with their own databases of members and activists. Only a small amount of data was consistent between the local offices.

The SEIU New York State Council needed a common database system that would contain member information and track communications and activist involvement from each of the 39 locals.

During a critical period, such as before an election, the member information was difficult to consolidate for an effective member communication campaign because of the inherent differences in the way each local stored its data. In short, there was no efficient way to access important information on SEIU members from various locals due to basic database inconsistencies.

Intellis developed a customized platform for the specific needs of a political action group in order to provide a consolidated member information system that could consolidate local database information and track communications and activist involvement.

This system included several advanced processes for data cleaning and enhancement from phone matching to voter status enhancement. To enable SEIU to access all local union member information from a central location (400,000 members, 1 million members and family combined), Intellis provided database structure and communications environment.

Intellis provided the following:

• Internet user interface development
• Website architecture
• Database design, development, and installation
• Data collection menu developer software
• Communications/Notifications software.
• Implementation of geographical mapping capability
• Data conversion to a uniform format
• Repeatable conversion scripts for each local union branch
• Hiring and training of a system administrator
• System technical support

SEIU was able for the first time to access all local union member information from a central location via a secure Internet connection.

The system enabled the SEIU New York State Council to send highly relevant information to any of its 350,000 rank and file members and the 1,000,000 union and family members, providing a very powerful political component to the existing work of the union. Over 10 million letters have been generated since OneVoice went live, at an average pace of 250,000 per month. During that time over one million member contacts have been recorded.

The system also provides an endless number of complex sorting and data compiling functions that will allow the SEIU New York State Council to think beyond its current boundaries.