In the second part of our State of the Black Business Directory, we want to discuss data validation. Data validation of a black owned business directory involves two major parts: 1) ensuring all businesses are black owned and 2) ensuring all business information is up-to-date. We learned quickly during our initial competitive analysis that data validation is a major issue with most directories. Before we even started IABB, I personally saw this issue with the Around the Way app a few years back. The first search I performed returned results where the first few businesses were either closed or not black owned. This experience made data validation a priority for our team.
Initially, we thought the best way to combat this issue would be to manually research each submitted business before approving the business to be searchable in our directory. We quickly discovered that our team would be a bottle neck in quickly approving businesses for the directory. After scrapping that plan, we decided on the following process:
- Allow all businesses into the directory without approval with minimum information - we’ve found that most (>95%) of businesses submitted to our directory are black owned. Knowing this fact, we decided to open up our submission process to allow businesses to be immediately available in our directory.
- Manual auditing by the IABB team on a weekly basis - our team gets notified upon each business submission. If a business doesn't seem to be valid, we manually audit and either update or remove the business. (Once we expand our team, we plan to have a role or two dedicated to business outreach as well as business validation)
- Provide an easy to use Report Business tool to allow users to flag businesses for review - the report a business functionality utilizes you the consumer as another line of defense. A user can flag a business for many reasons ranging from not being black owned to inaccurate information. (This feature is currently only available on the web. We will be implementing report a business into our mobile app in a minor release scheduled for October or November)
- Automated scripts to validate business information is correct - we're a bunch of techies so we've written scripts to automatically check certain business information. ex. We check website and other urls to see if they return a valid response. If an invalid response is received, the business is flagged for manual review.
No directory will ever be perfect and have 100% correct data; however, that fact does not stop IABB from striving to reach that goal. Between our internal team, scripted automation, and our self-governing user base, we are confident we can provide an accurate directory with little to no data validation issues.