Illustration showing a stamped notification reading Deceased with an arrow and Returned to Sender, highlighting best practices for managing deceased records.
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Best Practices for Handling Deceased Records

Should you continue to mail to previous contributors who’ve been flagged as deceased? The answer to this question is more complex than you might think

Deceased Records

It is very important to be sensitive to the wishes of the grieving family members. If a family member has contacted your company to ask that no further mail be sent to the deceased, offer your condolences and immediately remove them from all future mailings.

You should also periodically match your file against one or more of the databases that contain reported deceased records. However, in this instance, it may not be a good idea to just remove these records from your house list. The surprising reality is that mailings to deceased individuals often have a solid response rate. Perhaps the surviving spouse wants to continue to contribute to the organizations the couple used to support together, or perhaps the record was incorrectly flagged as deceased.

Rather than removing any records flagged as deceased, it is usually a good idea to test the response you receive when mailing to this group of records. If you have not been automatically flagging such records up to this point, the easiest way to test this is to look at the results of one of your recent mailings. Was the return rate from mailing to this segment acceptable? If so, continue to mail to this group and retest periodically.

If there ceases to be a response to your mailings at some point, it is appropriate to flag these records and eliminate them from future mailings. We do not typically recommend including these records in a future donor reactivation campaign.

Best practices for rented acquisition lists are different. Since the family has no prior relationship with your organization, mailing to records flagged as deceased on one of these lists is less likely to be productive. For this reason, most of our clients automatically cleanse such names from the acquisition list. However, because you have no idea how detailed the update processes are for a rented list, you may want to also periodically test this decision.

Finally, you may want to consider testing “To the Family Of” in the beginning of the name field for records you believe are accurately flagged as deceased to which you plan to continue to mail.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

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PCOA
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Should you use PCOA to clean your direct mail list?

PCOA

The U.S. is a very transient country. With over 11% of all Americans moving in a typical year, keeping your direct mail list up-to-date is an ongoing challenge.

If you’re regularly mailing solicitations, newsletters or other pieces to a large list, you are undoubtedly already running your list through the USPS’s National Change of Address (NCOA) database. Not only does this cut down drastically on the number of undeliverable pieces you’re sending, but having processed your list through NCOA within 95 days of a mailing qualifies it for reduced postage rates.

An unfortunate fact, however, is that as many as 40% of Americans who move don’t bother to file a change of address notice with the USPS. They may have forgotten or they might have consciously decided not to do so in order to avoid creditors or cut down on unsolicited mail. But even those who didn’t change their address with the post office probably did notify their cell phone company, cherished magazines, and other companies they didn’t want to lose touch with.

A consortium of these organizations banded together in 1995 to share this information with each other and make the data available to services like MMI Direct. It is definitely worth testing whether running your list through the Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA) database pays out in terms of higher returns on your mailings. Fortunately, while PCOA processing used to cost several times more than NCOA, PCOA’s cost has dropped substantially in recent years.

Assuming the benefits of PCOA do pay out for your list, you then need to determine how frequently you should use it. Relocation rate is heavily dependent upon age — Americans in their twenties move nine times more frequently than those in their seventies, for example. It is also heavily dependent upon income, with almost twice as many Americans earning less than $5,000 a year moving in 2012 (13%) compared to those with an annual income of over $100,000 (7%). So it may make sense for managers of lists consisting primarily of older, wealthier donors to run their full house list through PCOA far less frequently than a company whose target audience is young gamers.

You should also consider if there are specific segments of your list that should be updated more frequently than the list as a whole. For example, you may want to run lapsed contributors through PCOA every six months to help you reconnect with individuals who’ve previously shown their willingness to support you.

Finally, an important question to consider is whether to update address data for active donors in your database if PCOA indicates they’ve moved. No process is error-free and, if someone has donated to you recently, you may have more accurate data than that in a compiled database.

Figuring out how to optimize your list is challenging. If we can help you in any way, please don’t hesitate to call (410) 561-1500.

 

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

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