If you’re a nonprofit using Direct Mail, data is crucial to your success.

Knowing who your donors are, when they last donated, how much they donated, and how many times they’ve donated all factor into how you speak to your donors.

And yet, data has a tendency to get out of hand very quickly. We call this ‘Sick Data’. Misfiled, duplicate, and incomplete records are rampant issues in donor data bases that impact the overall health of any campaign.

 

And it’s easy to see how data becomes unhealthy:

  • Often times data is being pulled from different sources.
  • It’s also being keyed in by different individuals with different levels of proficiency and experience.
  • And data is time consuming to keep clean.

All of the above are true contributing factors to the overall data health. The next – common – assumption however is false:

Data is costly to clean.

In fact, the opposite couldn’t be MORE true – it’s more costly NOT to have clean data.

When you consider that an average response rate is between 2 – 4 %, it’s easy to ask “is it really worth cleaning the other 96 – 98% of the records?” The answer is YES.

First, who knows where that next all important monthly donor is going to come from. It could be from that one customer who was dropped from your mailing due to an improper Postal Code.

Second, with the costs to postage these days a cleaner database will save you money in unnecessary potential duplicate mailings, or mail getting returned to sender due to it being undelivered.

And third, what about the donors you risk offending with poor data? Just recently we had a client that mailed some donors twice accidentally on the same mailing, and as a result actually lost monthly donors due to perceived waste of funds. Donors are sensitive to how their donations are used, and not afraid to take action if they feel in even the slightest that money is being wasted.

So what’s a small nonprofit to do to keep their data in tip top health? Regularly have your data ‘scrubbed’.

This is particularly true if you’re managing your own mailings. As a service provider that helps our clients with all facets of their mailings (creative,  data sourcing, data cleansing), I recognize that some of our services often come at a cost that some clients prefer not to pay and attempt to manage themselves. I can respect this, and many do these functions with proficiency, but it comes with perils as well. Most notably on the data side…..expert data cleansing is relatively inexpensive (less than $100 for 5,000 records), and can prove to be INFINITELY less expensive when it reduces overall costs AND increases responses. Just that one additional monthly donor can make a huge difference.

Before sending your next appeal, take another look at your data. Better yet, send your data to JR Direct for a completely FREE Health Check to assess the cleanliness of your data and a FREE quote on optimizing your next appeal. Contact us today to learn how we can help improve the health of your database.