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How To Get your Data Ready for a Mailing: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1208610
It's time to send out your end-of-year donation ask, but is your data up to the task? You could send it out right now, but physical mailings cost money for postage and take time to set up. We think it's worth cleaning your data beforehand to minimize mistakes like bad or duplicate addresses. This is especially true if this is your first mailing through PatronManager, or if you haven't sent one out in a while.
It’s best to start this process about a month in advance to allow ample time to complete these steps with plenty of time for your mailing.
The work you do on the front end will absolutely pay off; you'll reach more patrons and, ultimately, get more out of your mailing.
In this article, we'll cover:
- NCOA Updates and why they're a great first step
- Deduping Accounts and Contacts
- Standardizing fields like names and addresses
- Normalizing name data in excel
This process involves a lot of data work! Make sure you're knowledgeable about DIY Data before you start.
Alternatively, our data team can help you with this as part of a paid data project.
1. NCOA Update
A National Change of Address Update (NCOA) is a great first step to prepare for a mailing. It ensures you have the most up-to-date addresses possible for your patrons. Some things to consider:
- If you need a recommendation for a good mail house for running an NCOA update, the PatronManager Client Community is a great place to start.
- Before you send your files to the mail house, it's a good time to ensure your zip codes are complete and not missing any leading “0”s.
- When you send your files to the mail house, you must include the Contact and Account IDs; without those IDs, you won't be able to use the data they send back.
2. Dedupe
Now that all your addresses are up to date, it'll be a lot easier to find duplicate Accounts and Contacts in your system - and you don't want to send two pieces of mail to the same address.
We recommend you run reports summarizing by identifying data fields (like email address, address, last name, etc.) to find and merge potential duplicate Accounts and Contacts.
Alternatively, our data team can help you identify and merge duplicate Accounts and Contacts as part of a paid data project. This process takes anywhere from 4-8 weeks, plus the time it takes your team to review potential matches, and is a good option if you:
- Haven't deduped in a while or
- Are noticing lots of duplicates in your system
To get started, check out our Data Project Services.
3. Update/standardize names, salutations, suffixes, street addresses, etc.
So you've got all the addresses corrected, your Accounts and Contacts merged, you're almost there!
This is a good time to mass update your Accounts and Contacts with corrections to:
- Names: are names in proper case?
- Salutations: are salutations necessary, and if so, are they accurate and being abbreviated consistently?
- Suffixes: are suffixes pulled out to the suffix field instead of in the last name field, and are the abbreviated consistently?
- Streets: are streets in proper case, and are street types (St., Ln., etc.) abbreviated consistently?
- States: are all states written out, capitalized, and/or abbreviated consistently?
- Countries: are all countries abbreviated consistently?
4. Normalize Name Data
Now that your names, salutations, and suffixes are updated, it'll be a lot easier to normalize your name data. We recommend exporting your Contacts and Accounts with all those fields in the file and then using some Excel magic to create standardized values the following fields:
- Formal Address Name: “Mr. John Smith, Jr.”, or “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”
- Formal Salutation: “Mr. Smith”, or “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”
- Informal Address Name: “John Smith” or “John and Jane Smith”
- Informal Salutation: “John” or “John and Jane”
Once you have your Excel file ready, you can update all your Accounts and Contacts in one fell swoop.