Focusing on clean databases is crucial right now
After a tough period that has seen a significant drop in donations, charities must look for new ways to grow revenue. It’s time for them to take a step back and examine areas that will help set their income on an upward path.
Donor data – one of the most valuable assets a charity has – is an excellent place to start. If maintained and used correctly, such data can help the charity prevent donor churn, drive revenue and thrive in a highly challenging environment.
Impact of clean data
Clean contact data helps avoid expensive mis-deliveries of marketing communications and products charities might sell online to support their fundraising efforts. Return to sender is not only costly in a financial respect, but also in the outcome of a poor donor experience. Through targeted, personalised marketing communications and speedy delivery of fundraising packs or products, charities can maintain a positive experience, which is vital since acquiring a new donor costs five times more than retaining one.
Clean data also empowers the gathering of accurate, valuable donor insight, such as a single customer (or donor) view, also called SCV, which can be leveraged to improve communications. Sound decision making relies on this type of high quality, reliable supporter data. Larger charities must encourage consistency of donor data between departments – how it’s collected, stored and shared, for example - to obtain an effective SCV. This will lead not only to business process efficiencies, but it will also enable accurate SCV, delivering insight to help reduce donor churn.
Preventing data decay
Acquiring and maintaining clean donor data is an ongoing challenge and one that many charities need to make a greater priority. 91% of all organisations have data quality problems, with charities’ donor data degrading at about 2% each month. Without regular intervention, as much as 25% of donor data goes bad over the course of a year.
Fortunately, many of the most common data issues can be easily repaired, for example data that is simply incorrect, such as a donor’s name, address, email or telephone number. Whether handled in batch form or in real-time as data is collected, a few simple, cost-effective changes to data quality routines can ensure data accuracy as well as a smooth onboarding experience for donors.
It is time for charities to implement smarter practices for cleansing and standardising data.
Address autocomplete processes
An address autocomplete or lookup service gathers accurate address data in real time, offering only correct data to consumers, for example during the onboarding stage of a new donor. It’s a vital convenience – particularly in an age when people are often completing contact forms on small mobile screens, making them more prone to mistakes. Approximately 20% of addresses entered online contain errors including spelling mistakes, wrong property numbers and inaccurate postcodes.
Capturing the correct address at the first point of contact is ideal – with regular updates of address data through the life of a donor, charities ensure efficiency, reduce cost over time and maintain happier supporters. An address autocomplete service also helps charities to deliver a standout donor service by reducing the number of keystrokes required — by up to 70% — when typing an address. This drives a speedy, convenient checkout process and reduces the probability of a potential supporter logging off prior to reaching the payment page.
Suppression data techniques
Data suppression strategies help charities highlight those who have moved or are otherwise no longer at the address on file. In addition to removing bad addresses, this service includes deceased flagging – an important feature that ensures mail is not sent to those donors who have passed away, upsetting their friends and relatives, and potentially tarnishing the brand image of the charity. This is critical when those in the older age brackets are more likely to be regular and generous donors to charities.
Data deduplication is important
Duplicate data is a common result when donor contact data is collected incorrectly at different touchpoints – a growing problem for charities in the digital age. Also, deduplication is of the utmost importance to those larger charities which may have accumulated many different databases over time, for example if they have merged with other charities.
Most databases contain 8-10% duplicate records, each of which takes effort to identify and remove. Not only can duplicate data be costly in terms of time and money when communicating with supporters, but it can also adversely affect reputation. If a donor receives two mailings in their name, with one spelled incorrectly, it can demonstrate that you lack an understanding of them – who they are and the value they bring – damaging the image of your brand in their eyes.
It may even communicate to the donor that you are happy to waste their contribution and your tight budget on duplicate mailings.
To rectify this, charities can deploy an advanced fuzzy matching tool to seamlessly and effectively merge and purge the most difficult records. Some deduplication services can also recognise and group criteria that matches, such as several donors belonging to the same household, to better understand donor relationships, lifecycle and needs. This insight can also be used to eliminate unnecessary multiple mailing to the same household to cut down on print and postage costs.
AI works for data quality
Now that you’ve deployed the basics to ensure accurate customer data, AI can add even greater value to the data you hold. For example, a type of machine learning called semantic technology can readily deliver high value, in-depth intelligence on existing donors. Semantic technology, or semtech, associates words with meanings and recognises the relationships between them.
It works by delivering powerful real time connections between donor records, combining the missing pieces of data to support an informed decision about the content of a communication to a supporter - one that will encourage them to fundraise or donate more.
Smart data benefits
Clean donor contact data can be effectively analysed to improve marketing efforts to drive revenue from existing supporters, as well as to source new potential donors. For example, an accurate postal address of a donor can be used to obtain valuable demographic data such as household income, marital status of the residents, whether the property is owner occupied, and if children are resident. Once this data is at hand, segmenting it by the different audience groups enables tailored content and outreach campaigns suited to their individual preferences.
Additionally, with this information, charities can define their best supporters' unique attributes, predict likely future donating behaviour, and identify new prospects who “resemble” their most valuable donors. This enables charities to undertake important sales clustering campaigns to source potential new donors.
Data tools often add layers of value. For instance, some deduplication services use latitude and longitude coordinates and proximity thresholds to identify duplicate records that are geographically close together. This enables marketers to detect matching records at different addresses within a specified distance to each other. These same tools also make it possible to select and combine the best elements from multiple records on the same donor for a more complete single record.
For example, an email address might be associated with one record for a donor and a phone number associated with a different record for the same donor. Bring these two sources of data together to create a single “golden record” with important donor contact data. This is a vital approach for charities to take as they often have huge volumes of donor data. It also helps them to deliver a highly accurate SCV for future marketing and communications activity.
Perfecting donor databases
While it is not possible to control the external forces such as macro-economics and pandemics that are making fundraising extremely difficult right now, charities can control their own destinies when it comes to improving data-driven business practices to fuel greater revenue. It is time to perfect donor databases for long term value, which requires cleansing, suppression, deduplication and integrating AI solutions.
By taking this approach charities are in the best possible position to reduce churn and drive increased donations, protecting the use of donor contributions while delivering a standout experience for donors.
