10 tips for Spring cleaning your donor data
Guest Blogger | 8 April 2015 | Blogs
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 This means that within a year up to a third of the data within a database could be out of date.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.
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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 is Product Development Director at Millennium Data, an award winning provider of suppression products including renowned deceased file, Mortascreen and home movers suite, SmartLINK and SmartDEPART.
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