Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends,” sang the Beatles. Our Executive Director Frank Graffeo found himself humming that tune recently, thanks to some help he got from our good friend Jonah Rabinowitz at the W. O. Smith Music School in Nashville.

Earlier this year Jonah showed Frank how to set up a new, super easy-to-use computerized data base for the Joy of Music School. The database, which uses the FileMaker Pro software program, is modeled on one Jonah has built at W.O. Smith over the past 20 years.

Finding a good program to consolidate and manage all our records has been a longtime struggle. “We continually met with roadblocks or malfunctions and couldn’t afford expensive computer coders and programmers to fix them,” says Frank.

“The problem with commercial database products is you get what they want you to track,” explains Jonah, who has
been executive director at W.O. Smith since 1995. “With our system, we can collect any kind of info we want.” For example: “Every teacher gets a roster of students,” says Jonah. “This program allows us with one stroke to look up that roster of students by name, what they worked on the previous semester, notes from previous teacher, and more.”

At a Berklee City Music Network function in Boston, Jonah showed Frank how he could access all of W.O. Smith’s data using FileMaker Pro – on his cell phone. “I was just blown away,” says Frank. Not long after, Jonah arrived for an afternoon in Knoxville to help the staff set up our own FileMaker Pro system.

Jonah describes himself as happy to help. “Anything that keeps Frank and his team away from their computer screens is a good thing,” he says. “We all spend way too much time doing paperwork.”

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