Nick’s selection of Game of Thrones to illustrate the importance of donor identity, prompts me to seize on the Barr-Trump Exoneration Victory Lap preceding public release of the Mueller Report to spotlight a much overlooked, but fundamentally important problem: the highly likely inaccuracy of address information in your donor list.

“How accurate are the donor addresses on your database?” As fundamental and simple as this question is, I’ve found that few fundraisers can truthfully answer that question.  And that same number could probably care less. After all, as “fundraising professionals” they have higher, more sophisticated issues to deal with.

Yet knowing how many appeals, renewal notices and newsletters go undelivered is rather basic. If 5%-7% of your database is undeliverable (the average for nonprofits in the US) you’ve handicapped your brilliant fundraising plan from the git go. And if another 2% to 3% of your donors are “deceased” you’ve added embarrassment and reputational damage to the problem; each time one of your communications arrives at the dead one’s household it triggers anger, frustration, or grief.

At the recent AFPICON conference T.Clay Buck poignantly illustrated the problem of what he calls “Compounding Data Quality”—in this case the compounding negative effect that bad addresses have on an organization.  As you’ll see in Clay’s chart below even a 1% per year loss of correct addresses costs an organization with 25,000 donors at least $157,000 over a five-year period.

[For a detailed explanation of this calculation see Clay’s post in his Annual Fund Lab.]

That’s a real eye-opener—or should be—for all of who blithely assume that “someone else” is taking care of the problem.  “That’s Ronnie’s job.”(Do you know whether Ronnie is doing his job?) ….”Our mail shop does it” (Chances are the mail shop corrections are not posted to your database.)… “Our CRM takes care of keeping our addresses up-to-date.”  ( Almost always not true.)

Of all the magic, glow- in-the-dark claims made by the fundraising CRMs offering donor management services to small and mid-sized organizations only two that I’ve been able to identify—Bloomerang and eTapestry—  offer address correction as part of their standard fee (although DonorSnap does provide one update for free).

Of the two, only Bloomerang provides its users with automatic, nightly updates on addresses, and notification of deceased donors.

Some of the other donor management services do offer address correction services, but for fees ranging from reasonable to exorbitant. For a summary of popular CRMs and their practices see the CRM NCOA Report Card. This practice has always struck me as strange since I assumed that any basic donor management system would automatically keep addresses updated without putting their users through a maze of data upload and download machinations or charge their customers a premium to clean data already in their CRM.

Until I started digging into this I too felt exonerated because surely someone else had taken care of such a fundamental function.  But as I worked with our sister company TrueGivers to put TrueNCOA and TrueDeceased into the AgitatorToolbox  I quickly learned that other fundraisers who had made the same assumptions as I did were about to be shocked.

Here’s one shocking piece of insight that Tim Hunnewell, head of TrueGivers, updated me on this week. Their review and updating of donor addresses and deceased donors over a group of 1,200 small and mid-sized organizations containing a total of 9.6 million records found 545,000 bad addresses (5.66% of the total) and 268,000 deceased donors (2.79% of the total).  That’s a lot of wasted appeals and communications…lots of lost income and donor retention…and a ton of reputational damage.

If you apply Clay Buck’s Compounding Data Quality exercise and assume an average gift size of just $40 in the first year alone those 1200 organizations would have lost $21.8 million. And if those addresses were not corrected the five year loss would exceed the $100 million mark.

So, if you’re wondering why in the world The Agitator would be dealing with something as “mundane” as bad addresses and dead donors you now know the reason. All the great copywriting…all the donor care imaginable…and all the brilliant strategies in the world don’t matter if the donor no longer receives   your communications.

The assumptions we make that ‘someone else’ has taken  care of the basics and therefore we’re free and clear of the fundraiser’s basic responsibility is simply wrong.

And when it comes to other  seemingly “mundane” functions (easy-to-find contact info for your organization…a donor help line that goes unanswered or is poorly answered…a donation page that frustrates and drives away donors) that go to the heart of basic fundraising,  are we also too quick in prematurely exonerating ourselves?

Roger