# 10 tips for Spring cleaning your donor data

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2015/04/08/10-tips-for-spring-cleaning-your-donor-data/
- Published: 2015-04-08T09:24:42+01:00
- Author: Guest Blogger

**When people move house there’s a whole host of people they need to tell. Banks,
credit cards and other financial institutions, insurance companies, local government
authorities, utility companies, TV and Internet providers, doctors, dentists, opticians
and hospitals, vets, DVLA, mail order companies, automotive dealers, loyalty card
providers, subscription services, to name a few. **

Typically, charities fall to the bottom of the priority list, alongside travel companies
and retailers.

## Six million people move house each year

As a result of the six million people that move house each year and the half million
people that pass away donorbases decay at a rate of 3 per cent per month. This means
that within a year up to a third of the data within a database could be out of date.
For charities this represents a significant loss in potential donations and data
hygiene is therefore key.

## Advertisement

## Ten tips for keeping your donor data in order

Firstly, it is important to review your data on a 3-6 month basis. Set aside a day
in the diary to do this, otherwise it has a tendency to creep. You should carry 
out the following:

1. **Delete legacy data**, don’t keep old records for the sake of it. Remember rubbish
in = rubbish out. A leaner database that reaps rewards is better than a large one
that doesn’t deliver. Ultimately the more records you have, the more costly it is
as the likelihood of marketing to goneaways or people that have died is higher

2. **Review your dedupe and merge rules** to avoid false positives (merging records
that aren’t duplications)

3. **Use your hard bounce alerts** from the ESP to remove old email addresses

4. **Remove any addresses from the database that have been ‘returned to sender’**
and screen against a Do Not Mail file to ensure that you don’t annoy current donors
or future prospects

5. **Segment your database**. Know who your best donors are and ensure that you 
concentrate on keeping this data as up to date as possible. Pareto’s Principle of
spending 80 per cent of your time, effort and resource, on 20 per cent of donors
is proven to reap rewards

6. If your database hasn’t had a spring clean for a while **get a free data cleaning
audit** from a data bureaux to understand where improvements are needed and then
embark on a spot of DIY.

7. **Invest in suppression products** that will trace lapsed donors and remove deceased
individuals from the database

8. **Maximise inbound calls**. If a donor calls check that you have them in the 
database and that their information is correct

9. **Flag correct records as clean** to avoid repetition or accidental deletion

10. **Rinse and repeat**. Remember data hygiene is an ongoing, time intensive, tedious
job. But it pays dividends for donations.
 

![Karen Pritchard](https://www.fundraising.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/karen-
pritchard.jpg)

Karen Pritchard, Millennium Data

_**Karen Pritchard** is Product Development Director at [Millennium Data](http://www.wilmingtonmillennium.co.uk),
an award winning provider of suppression products including renowned deceased file,
Mortascreen and home movers suite, SmartLINK and SmartDEPART._

  

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