The NCOA database tracks all address changes or moves in the US. The last thing that you should do to qualify for a USPS discount is running a National Change of Address (NCOA) service on your database. This basically ensures that their automated systems can read and route your mailings easily. In order to qualify for a nonprofit bulk mail rate, the USPS will require you to have your addresses validated. Not only does it make your data look nice, it also qualifies you for postal discounts from the USPS. You are probably wondering why address validation is so important. If you search for “Data Validation” in the AppExchange, you’ll find several who work very well with nonprofit data and that meet your needs. The Salesforce AppExchange also has multiple vendors who offer this service. Most of the nonprofits I work with rely on third-party vendors to aggregate this data from the USPS and provide it in one simple tool. There are multiple tools provided by the USPS which define these address formats, but navigating through these tools can be challenging. For example, you would have “Street” abbreviated as “St.” Most nonprofits in the United States will base this off of the United States Postal Service (USPS) format. Address Validation in Direct Mail for Nonprofit FundraisingĪddress validation is the process of ensuring that all of the addresses in your database meet a standard format. If this is the case for your nonprofit, be sure to work with your merge/purge vendor to ensure that they are included those deep lapsed names in the final file sent to the mail shop.
One thing to note: some organizations will include deep lapsed names in acquisition mailings. This final file is then what you send to the mail shop for printing. This results in a final acquisition file that has all of your current constituents scrubbed out. From there, they will then remove any names in the acquisition file that are also in your house file. The vendor will take both files and standardize the addresses. That acquisition file will also have names and addresses. Next, you will provide this vendor with the acquisition list you purchased. It usually has IDs, names, addresses, and maybe an email address. The first would be an export from your Salesforce database (“house file” in direct mail speak).
As the nonprofit, you would provide your vendor two files. How does it work? The process is usually done for nonprofits by an outsourced vendor such as Infogroup, Merkle, MMI, or Donorbase. The merge/purge process ensures that this does not happen. When you purchase an acquisition list, you want to make sure that you are not purchasing names that you already own (e.g. Why is this important to direct mail? It normally becomes important when you are running acquisition programs. So what is it exactly? Merge/purge is the process of bringing two data sets together and purging out the duplicates. Merge and Purge Details for Direct Mail in Nonprofit Fundraising We will focus on the merge/purge process, address validation, and postal discounts.
Today we are going to be diving into the weeds and focusing on some of the administrative details of direct mail. I’m a Solution Engineer for based in Charleston, SC.
DATA MERGE PURGE SERIES
Hello and welcome back to my blog series about direct mail! My name is Dustin.
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