Pros and Cons of a Master Contact List

[JJJ]

Right now we have a few different bases where contacts live and we're thinking of restructuring our workspace so there is one master contact list. Within the master contacts table we will have filtered views that can be synced to the relevant bases. The bases where our current contacts live have automations through Airtable and Zapier with 2 way syncs with our Salesforce and other apps. In theory it makes sense to have one master list so we can easily track all of the information for each contact in one place.

My fear is that creating one master list for the whole org to use (~24 people) will cause issues if there are upload errors/mistakes or automation errors/mistakes that will impact the whole org all at once. Our organization has contacts for our members (10,000+), donors, prospective donors(5k+), press contacts, political contacts, and basically anyone else we interact with. I'm also wondering if the time commitment of this would be worth it right now. I imagine this is going to be a significant project to set up and roll out and we don't have a huge staff capacity right now. 

Does anyone have any advice, pros, cons, about our situation? TIA!

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm what pain points are you facing right now that make you want to do the restructure?  To me the main pro would be just having consolidated data and everyone on your team having access to it, while the cons would be the data needing to be managed, which might lead to some workflow friction / lag depending on how you set up the system of who gets to modify the data set

Might be worth checking out the data library feature if you do end up going down this road as it seems like you're worried about the data getting messed up too: https://support.airtable.com/docs/data-sets-and-verifying-data-in-airtable

If you're wondering whether it's worth it, that in itself might be an answer, really