Data full of bad or invalid addresses significantly reduces the effectiveness of your year-end appeal. Increase your return on investment in two steps: update constituent addresses with a National Change of Address (NCOA) update and get rid of your duplicate constituents.
National Change of Address
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 35.7 million people moved (and thus changed their addresses) between 2013 and 2014. Don't leave those people out of your appeal efforts! An NCOA update compares the addresses in Bloomerang CRMto the requested address changes filed with the United States post office. It also formats the addresses correctly.
Properly formatted, correct addresses increase how many people you can reach with your year-end appeal. It reduces how much money you might waste in sending undeliverable mail. Learn how NCOA Processing with Bloomerang CRM works.
Find Duplicates
Reduce your mailing costs by cutting duplicate constituents, and spare yourself the embarrassment of asking members of the same household for separate gifts. To find duplicates:
Create a constituent report.
In the Include section, click Add Filter, Has Addresses, and OK.
In the Exclude section, add a filter for bad addresses. (Filter path: Has Addresses, Specific Addresses, Is Bad.)
Click Or underneath this filter. Select Is Incomplete.
Setting the Exclude filters
Click Save And, and then Keep Editing.
Name the report "Duplicate Constituents."
The report lists all constituents who have good, complete addresses. Organizations are alphabetized by their first letter, and people are sorted by their last names. Scroll through the report. If you see duplicate constituents, merge them.
After you get rid of the duplicate constituents, group constituents into households:
Open the Duplicate Constituents report.
Click the Primary Street column.
Click Group by This Column and then OK.
Click Save And, and then Keep Editing.
Scan the list, and combine people with the same addresses into households.
Now when you send a letter to a household, everyone is included in that communication. However, emails will continue to be sent to individual email addresses.