Washing (and drying) your data

It comes up on a pretty regular basis in my experience, be it from the phone program asking why we only have phone numbers for 60% of our constituents, from the VP asking how come he can't find a number on that hot new prospect he just has to talk with today, the gift processing team asking about the address updates from the phone program last night or the direct mail folks asking when NCOA was last run on the data. IT is data quality and hygiene.

We are hopefully all familiar with NCOA and the updates that provides to our mailing data and in the same fashion, we should be treating our e-data at least as, if not more carefully with an opt in process and clear compliant opt-outs as well as utilizing strategies and approaches that properly maintain the reputation of the servers that you are sending through.

Just as important however, is making sure that your constituents and donors understand what and why you need what you need. St. John's is saving almost $300,000 this year by changing all of our forms to authenticate digital transactions on the address + zip level rather than just zip as we have been doing for the past decade.
That requires asking for that information on each and every transaction. So long as you are asking for that, include email and primary phone (allows them to supply a home or cell #) along with spouse information on every interaction. Whenever possible (and it nearly always is) also collect business information - title, employer and email (you can get phone given those!.)

"Drying" your data through social media can be a huge boon as well - LinkedIn and Facebook alone can provide a ton of updates through contests, games and job posting offerings at little to no cost directly through the social media tool. This is not only getting you good data directly from the source but building affinity while doing it!