A response to Siva's request to be updated on Contact Database Work

We have begun updating the contact database starting last Monday.
I am finding that it takes on average fifteen minutes to half an hour to verify only one contact. The reason for this is that the majority of contacts in the database (without an email address) no longer can be reached by the phone number associated with them. Because of this, I have tried doing internet searches by name, region, address, organisation etc... the internet search usually takes anywhere from 10-20 minutes. Then I usually get a department or company number. This is where the bureaucracy starts. I have also sent emails to companies that I was not able to reach by telephone.

Out of the contacts I have begun looking up, there are a significant number that I have still not found yet.
I can only imagine how the difficulty of this task is going to escalate when we have a go at the overseas pool.

Since I started I have spent two mornings on the contact database. Sham has mentioned that I should place priorities on various things in my activity work plan.
*** Perhaps I could get more direction on this matter. ***

Shanta has also mentioned that it would be very helpful if we can get an emails out to those with emails ASAP. Since there is a fair number of contacts in the database with emails.
I want to hold this off because I am not completely confident in what I have created. I am still doing research on mass mailer software. I do believe that I will be able to provide the right solution eventually but it is going to take time.
The two things I am worried about is that -
1. There is no way of verifying whether an email was sent properly. So if something stops working, we will not have any way to tell who has been sent emails properly and who has not.
SOLUTION(A): The work around for this is to use the free mass emailer software provided with Joomla! Which means that you will have to go through a spreadsheet and update records manually. The reason for this is that there will be no way to make every email unique. Without being able to make every email unique I can not provide the link that searches for the contact in our already existing database.
2. The page loading time for the contact form is very long. There are two reasons for this. First off, I wanted people to be directed to ARROW's domain (www.arrow.org.my) when they clicked on the link. I don't have access to a database management system on ARROW's website, however, I did determine that the current server does run PHP fine. So I piped data from another domain (www.plebeianbuilder.com). A SOLUTION(B) for this is to wait for us to go live with the new website. (which should be very soon)

Secondly, the contact database is a mess. (pointing fingers) Perhaps to put it better, the contact database works if you want to filter one thing at a time, but was not designed to filter many things all at once. There are too many tables and they are not properly normalized (http://databases.about.com/od/specificproducts/a/3nf.htm) Because of this, in order to extract the proper information from the database I had to invoke about 10 different SQL queries in one script performing joins with many tables. I could probably spend an entire day on rearranging the tables.
If we follow through with SOLUTION(A) and SOLUTION(B) I just want to note again that the trade off is that if we get say 500 people filling out this form - somebody will have to enter this information manually back into the Member First Microsoft Access based database.
Another trade off is that people will not be able to see the information we have for them. Because of this - they may be tempted to leave fields blank. I could make every field mandatory and provide a check system to validate every field. But then people may not fill out the form at all (and we get nothing). Another problem with this is that we will not have any way to validate the information we have on them in our database.
I am sorry. I've tried my best to make myself clear. Perhaps we can discuss this further.
I also wanted to note that we are encountering a unique problem. Normally when magazines send out subscriptions their viewers are paying for them. Lets say Mary Doe paid 150 bucks / year to subscribe to Time Magazine. If she moves - SHE is going to make sure Time sends the copy to the new address. For us - if she moves - WE are responsible for finding her new address. Perhaps we can contact other NGO's that have the similar problem and see how they handle this? (Does anyone know anybody with the similar problem?)