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David Gunnell
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Brighton, East Sussex, England |
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| Personal Profile | ||
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I am a proactive, highly motivated person with a creative and dedicated approach to my work. I have a background in marketing databases, with special focus on the charity sector, where an eye for detail, working to deadlines and the ability to effectively communicate with the customer, are central to the role I am an active member of my local baptist church and assist in various ways including being a deacon, leading a home group, leading a cluster of home groups, taking church services in rest homes, meeting people and assisting with the the web site. In my spare time I also enjoy walking, cooking, socialising and films. My favourite films are "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Unforgiven" To help you see if I'd fit into your current team, in a belbin test my three highest scores are plant, co-ordinator and implementer. In a jung test I came out as an ENFJ |
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| Key Technical Skills | ||
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Sigma
/ Alterian - Large, complex mailing selections - Designing and creating data warehouses - Analysis and management information SQL+ 9i MS FoxPro MS Access MS Excel MS Windows XP and Office XP |
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| Work Experience | ||
| Database Consultant (Self Employed Contractor) Jan 2006 - Present Day | ||
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Working as a freelance contractor
provides me with the flexibility to use my technical skills and
knowledge of the charity database sector to help a number of different
charities to run their database services effectively, whilst giving the
organisation flexibility and value for money. |
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| Key Achievements | ||
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At WWF-UK I helped during times when they were short staffed during busy periods of outgoing fundraising communications. This has enabled WWF-UK to get data selections out of their system in time to meet deadlines for fundraising appeals, despite staff shortages and having a heavy work load demanded of them. | |
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I also work for World Vision UK where I have helped them on a longer term basis, working for 1.5 years. I have been mainly concerned with reporting, data manipulation, creating ETL processes, ad-hoc queries and reports. I have taken on specific projects such as managing a large data cleaning exercise, managing their database. I also created an analysis and reporting tool, using Access, FoxPro and Excel. | |
| WWF-UK (Database Support Executive) March 2002 - Jan 2006 | ||
| Working at WWF continues to be a great opportunity to take my agency experience of database marketing in the charity sector and apply that directly to working in a charity. My main responsibility at WWF is to perform all of the data selections for fundraising appeals. This has been a demanding, but enjoyable role as the number, and complexity of data selections required has grown. I liaise closely with the fundraisers to understand their requirements for the data selection and to add value to the decision making process by my using my expert knowledge of the data and how the database works. I have also conducted data analysis and provided management information. To successfully provide this high level of service to the fundraisers I use such tools as, Sigma (which uses an Alterian engine), FoxPro, Access and SQL+. I recently successfully completed (June 2005) an SQL+ course run by Stay Ahead Training in London. Sigma is a data warehousing and analysis tool created by Occam Direct Marketing, with whom I have worked closely, including a 5 week period working in their offices near Bath, learning to use Sigma and performing data selections for mailings. I have taken on the responsibility of acting up as the Database Manager in the Database Mangers absence. This has enabled me to build on my managerial experience by, for example, conducting first round interviews for other database support executives. When I started at WWF they were at the beginning stages of moving from a remote, outsourced, bespoke, AS400 database, to using an `off the shelf` software package from Care Business Solutions. This was a mammoth project which involved: - identifying where modifications would be needed to the standard software in order to meet WWF's requirements and procedures, data mapping and migration, system testing and modifications testing. I also had the opportunity to provide training to the rest of the organisation on how to use the database. I was given some `train the trainer` coaching to help in this. | ||
| Key
Achievements As the sigma champion at WWF I created a Sigma data warehouse for mailing selections and data analysis. This data warehouse is automatically rebuilt on a weekly basis and contains hundreds of calculated fields. These pre-calculated fields enable quick and efficient analysis and selections to be done Automating regular jobs. These ranged from the rebuilding of the data warehouse to producing the output required to mail the adoption reports to supporters who adopt an animal. I got this particular task down form a 3 week job to 3 hours. Creating supporter rules. At WWF I implemented rules to safeguard against fundraisers over mailing people and mailing people at inappropriate times. This involved very complex scripting on in Sigma which holds the data warehouse. It works by seeing how long it had been since a supporter was last asked to take certain action. How long it had been since they took certain action. Then analysising that length of time, to determine if that supporter was eligible to receive an ask this time I implemented a method I called `Counts
and Crossovers` for fundraisers. This worked by providing fundraisers
with a complete breakdown of unique attributes or product holdings each
supporter had who had been selected. This way they could see not just
that a supporter had been selected because they were a legacy pledger,
but also that were a regular giver and had given over £50 in the
past year |
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| Voluntary Work (IT Assistant and Childrens Worker) Jan 2002 - Feb 2002 | ||
| Working as an IT Assistant for Hove YMCA undertaking a specific project, and I also taking the opportunity to work as part of the team running the half term holiday club at Holland Road Baptist Church. | ||
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Achievements Creating a software licences catalogue. To enable the IT team to locate quickly and effectively which software licences they held, the where abouts of the CD's and other information I was able to take on the new challenge and experience of working with children. Which I enjoyed and was presented with an award for most enthusiastic new team member |
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| Personal Fundraising Partnership (Senior Database Administrator) June 2000 -Nov 2001 | ||
| PFP (now trading as PTF - Personal Telephone Fundraising) was, at the time, the UK's largest charity fundraising agency. This gave me the opportunity to hone my database marketing skills to the voluntary sector. Here I was using FoxPro to merge, dedupe, clean, enhance and manipulate all the data sent to me from the charities for the telemarketing campaigns. This was a high through put work environment, where I'd be completing as many as 10+ jobs in a week. I was the senior member of the IT Operations team and, as such, would conduct FoxPro training and give technical support to the rest of the team. I was also responsible for the day-to-day running of the Operations Team, including work load distribution and scheduling, and would represent the department in weekly production meetings. I also acted up as the IT Operations manager in the manager's absence (which was frequent, including a full 3 month period). Having this managerial responsibility was a great experience which I enjoyed immensely. It has helped me to build my leadership and team skills and it has given me an opportunity to experience a more strategic side of the job as well as the technical side. | ||
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Achievements Successfully managing the IT Operations Team - For a period of 3 months between database managers I was acting up as the database manager. During this time I was able to mange the work load of the team (consisting of 3 other members of staff) to enable us to continue to provide data exports to internal and external customers on time As the FoxPro champion within the team I was able to teach FoxPro skills to the rest of team, by one on one training, team training and also creating training documents and manuals and raised FoxPro knowledge in the team I was able during my time at PFP to automate some aspects of the job by creating FoxPro programs to complete repetitive tasks, such as importing, exporting and applying segmentation |
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| Swetenhams Direct Marketing (Junior Programmer) Aug 1999 - June 2000 | ||
| At Swetenhams I worked in the bureau department, and was responsible for the data management for direct mailing campaigns from start to finish, including logging and checking all incoming cold and warm lists right through to outputting final data and even printing labels. I was using FoxPro and Access to merge, dedupe, clean, import and extract this data for a wide range of clients from financial companies to charities. This work gave me an excellent grounding in all aspects of database marketing. I built up great experience in data cleaning and data manipulation. | ||
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Key Achievements I was quickly able to get up to speed with a new package (FoxPro), learning a whole new programming language. |
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| Insurance GB (Administration Assistant) July 1995 - Jan 1998 (full time and part time) | ||
| At IGB my main responsibility was keying new policy holder details on to the database, although I was also involved in filing and organising the large amounts of post that came in every day. This gave me a good insight into the functional needs of a database, especially from a user's point of view. I was given a great amount of responsibility, which I enjoyed, and would, at times, supervise groups of temps. | ||
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Key Achievements Successfully completing a large filing
back log when I started the job within the time required Achieving a high rate of data entry and accuracy |
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| Schooling and Qualifications | ||
| Brighton University September 1996 - June 1999 | ||
| BSc Honours Computing and Geography 2ii (Specialising in databases) | ||
| Coulsdon College September 1993 - June 1995 | ||
| A-Level Computing AS-Level Science in Society AS-Level Psychology |
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Names
and address of referees can be supplied on request.
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