Experian's new service helps charities reduce mailings to 'goneaways'
Howard Lake | 25 March 2004 | News
Information solutions company Experian has launched ‘Absolute Movers’, a service to help charities keep track of donors who move home and changing their address.
Absolute Movers is designed to help charities improve the effectiveness of their direct marketing campaigns by reducing the waste created by mailing individuals who have moved home, or ‘goneaways’ in the jargon.
Experian claims that its unique data is updated and made available more quickly than other consumer suppression services currently available.
Advertisement
Keeping track of supporters’ current addresses is hard work. According to government statistics, more than 12% of the UK population move house each year: this is about 18,000 people every day. Where goneaway data is identified from returned mail, it can take months to receive, collate, capture and load the information before it is ready for use as a suppression list. Absolute Movers helps solve this problem by making goneaway data available much faster; the company has identified over 3.5 million new movers in the last six months alone.
Sue Tomalin, Data Quality Consultant for Experian’s Marketing Services division, believes that the speed with which goneaway data can be made available is essential for charities. “On average,” she said, “an individual receives 13 pieces of direct mail per month, so if there is a four month delay in identifying a single mover, 50 wasted mail packs will have been sent to their old address. Absolute Movers has been developed by Experian to address this specific weakness in the suppression data currently available to the charitable sector.”
In addition, Absolute Movers keeps up-to-date with people who temporarily move house and then return; for example, students who move away for the period of their study and work secondments.
Absolute Movers is available from Experian and through Experian Intact, the online data cleansing service.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.