In February 2009, at the Forum on Education Abroad's Fireside Dialogue, "Making the Case: Beyond the Basics of Risk Management," in Portland, Oregon, a number of senior education abroad professionals gathered to review and discuss the state of the field with regards to managing risks. Among several conclusions was the conviction that education abroad needed an incident database. As it set out to design the Incident Database pilot, the project committee outlined several goals. First, the committee wanted to collect a significant set of data that would allow it to make some quantitative statements about safety events in education abroad based on numbers of student programming days, i.e., it wanted to find out something about what actually happens. Secondly, the committee wanted to learn about incident databases. Lastly, the committee wanted to reveal all the obstacles and challenges that it had not as yet foreseen but had assumed that researchers might encounter, and then put everything together to determine the next steps for creating the incident database that will best serve the education abroad field. This Database Pilot Project Preliminary Report offers for the first time objective information on the range of incidents that occur on a wide variety of education abroad programs. It provides data well beyond anecdotes and opinion about what types of incidents occur and how frequently incidents occur. The Pilot Project signals also that the education abroad field can successfully work together to report this critical information in a rigorous, effective way that ultimately benefits the students who participate in education abroad programs.