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Keeping your data clean may seem like a tedious, low priority process that you’ll get to when you can, but the consequences of dirty data can be serious. These are data hygiene errors that have real budget and reputational costs.
Common hygiene mistakes include but are not limited to:
* Fundraising appeals sent to donors who have lost their homes in disaster areas;
* Donors receiving a mailing with their first name truncated on their membership card and all other personalized components; and,
* A premium mailing with a metal item inside sent to a prison address.
You’ve probably seen frequent data errors in your own mailbox, such as hyper-personalization gone wrong. A landscaping company might send you an offer based upon the size of your yard, but you live in an urban townhome with no lawn or plantings. A heat pump company might send an offer to replace your 15-year-old gas furnace when in fact you have an oil heating system.
Other common errors include mixing personal and business address elements — such as an office suite number added to a residential address. Another common error is using the wrong name in a household, i.e., your 20-something son living at home is identified as the head of household interested in retirement planning seminars. You might receive a mailing addressed to a deceased parent who passed away decades ago and never lived at your current residence.
Some data hygiene errors have serious consequences while others are merely flubs. All have costs related to campaign performance, budgets, your donor or customer relationships, and your organization’s brand.
Clean and accurate data ensures you’re reaching the best audience for your offer, improves mail deliverability, gets your mail delivered faster, reduces postage and printing costs and improves campaign performance. Clean data amplifies everything else — better creative, stronger offers, and smarter targeting. When your list is accurate, everything works harder, together.
Organizations where fundraisers prioritize data hygiene consistently get more out of every dollar they spend on direct mail. Knowing your data is clean means you can trust your results, make smarter decisions, and invest with confidence in what is working.
Good data hygiene is ultimately about respect for your donors, making sure their information is current and accurate and that every touchpoint reflects that care.
Data hygiene is not a one-time fix. Leaders at the best direct mail programs treat data hygiene not as a cleanup task, but as an ongoing discipline that pays dividends with every mailing, and compounds over time. Here are 10 specific ways to prioritize data hygiene in your direct marketing program:
- Pay attention to move data. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 11% to 14% of the U.S. population moves each year. And an analysis of Internal Revenue Service and Census Bureau data by the Wall Street Journal shows more people are moving to lower tax, business-friendly states. Make sure your data processing plan includes National Change of Address (NCOA) and Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA), which finds people who move but don’t file a change of address notice with the United States Postal Service (USPS). These keep your direct mail lists up to date.
- Be sensitive to geographic dislocation. Fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and other disasters can force people to relocate temporarily or permanently. Adjusting your outreach to these donors shows you care about them and reduces waste. Work with your strategists and postal advisors to determine if these donors should be solicited.
- Before launching a donor acquisition plan, understand how data hygiene impacts your return on investment and donor retention. Evaluate the state of your data infrastructure and its ability to handle an influx of new donors. What is your plan to onboard and cultivate your new donors? What information is being captured and is there a dependable record de-duplication process in place comparing responders to existing records in your database — are these “new” donors already on your file, as lapsed donors perhaps? What is your match criteria for eliminating duplicate records? Are your online and offline systems syncing? Become a donor yourself. Make a gift and track how your record looks in your database and how you are treated.
- Privacy concerns require better data hygiene. Fundraisers and the organization’s marketing partners need to follow legal requirements related to data privacy and security because donor trust is becoming closely tied to privacy. Data used incorrectly can negatively impact your organization. For example, not omitting the appropriate flagged names (such as a deceased individual) from your list exchange and rental files used in other nonprofit acquisition mailings can erode donor trust. When donor consent is unclear in your organization, every use of donor data becomes questionable and risky.
- Changing your database platform: Ingestion of data into a new constituent relationship management system (CRM) with a different format is always challenging but also a great opportunity to start fresh with clean data. Removing duplicate records can also help keep costs down if you have a large donor file and your new CRM licensing fees are based upon your number of records. This is especially true with eCRMs where multiple email addresses per record are very common.
- More data sources mean more chances for errors: Audit all platforms your organization uses to collect information from supporters, donors, volunteers, subscribers, program recipients, etc. Make sure your data standardization rules apply everywhere: website sign-ups, survey forms, event registrations, resource downloads, canvassing sign-ups, volunteer registrations and more.
- Develop a smart data suppression strategy and make sure your team understands how that strategy drives each campaign: What house files and individual records are you suppressing and why? Do you regularly scrutinize who is on your house suppression files? Which donors can you consider including in future campaigns? Work with your strategy team and data processing partners to audit your suppression files and uncover opportunities to reach out to viable donors who may have been improperly placed in these files.
- For deceased records processing, determine what makes sense for your organization and specific mailings: Some organizations test contacting family members of deceased donors by addressing mail “to the Smith family” or other sensitive and thoughtful options. Products are available that find a different person in the household for deceased names.
- Prison suppression: Unlikely to become donors, these addresses are typically omitted from mailings. Also, people in prison should not receive premium items that could endanger themselves or others.
- Design a thorough quality control (QC) process that minimizes errors: QC measures are critical at every step of your direct mail campaign, but are especially important at your data processing partner, where an error, such as a truncated data field in a large file being used for multiple mailings, can cause many expensive problems downstream. The problems include but are not limited to a negative donor experience, reprinting costs, mailing delays and revenue impacts, not to mention the concern of your leadership.
Make sure your data processing partner has thorough quality control processes and reporting in place to identify and correct problems early and before they negatively impact your campaigns. This includes analyzing the data hygiene of all individual lists used in your acquisition campaigns. Issues might be hidden in a summary analysis that only covers total mailing metrics. Highlight suspected errors to investigate further and discuss them with your partners.
After each mailing, apply your data hygiene results to your database/CRM: NCOA moves, PCOA moves, NCOA nixies (inexact record matches), ZIP corrections and deceased individuals.
Dig deeper into your data hygiene process to improve performance with every campaign and every dollar spent. Work with a data processing partner that specializes in data hygiene strategies customized to your specific needs and goals, and collaborates closely with your fundraising strategy team, your list broker and your analytics teams.
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Karin Haag is a data merge specialist at MMI Direct, a member of the Production Management Group family of companies. Her email is karin.haag@mmidirect.com. Jade Nguyen Swanson is director of business development at Production Management Group. Her email is jade.swanson@pmgdirect.net.
