We have a phantom member of our family.

When we moved into our first house, one of the people who sold us the house was Kimberly something-or-other.  We immediately started getting mail for Kimberly Ellinger – her first name, our last.  Our best guess is that a mailer assumed she got either married or divorced, changing her last name to the one that was now on the house.

That was 2003: five residences, three states, and two jobs ago.  During that time, no one named Kimberly Ellinger ever sent in a donation, mailed back a comment card, or bought something through the mail.  Because she doesn’t exist.  Never has.

But she followed us on all these moves.  She loves Land’s End catalogs.  She clearly needs car insurance.  She donates to animal and park nonprofits.  She gets her AARP card yearly.  And goodness help us, I think someone thought she registered to vote.  She’s more popular with politicians than my wife and I are.  And I should stress this: we are real; Kimberly is not.

Clearly, this is bad data.  It drives up all our costs.  As Roger pointed out last week, on average, 11% of donors can’t be reached, so we are wasting money on fake donors.  And we are wasting money of trying to acquire Kimberly Ellingers.

But if you think the worst thing that bad data can do is run up your costs, au contraire, mon petit escargot.

In 2014, a man received a letter from OfficeMax that was addressed to his name, with the second line of the address reading “Daughter Killed In Car Crash.”

Yes, a year earlier, his daughter had in fact been killed in a car crash.  As someone who has lost a daughter, I can tell you that this type of solicitation does not make me want to buy office products.  It makes me want to find the person responsible and punch them in the face until they run out of face or I run out of fist.

But there probably was no person responsible.  A screw-up that large requires a faulty system to let that letter go through.  And every snowflake in that avalanche pleads not guilty.

If you are a digital marketer feeling superior about the quality of your data, head over to https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences and see what Facebook thinks you like and have interacted with.  Mine, for example, thinks I have interacted with half of the car dealerships in the Western world and have liked political candidates from the right of Mussolini to the left of Che Guevara.  I was surprised there’s not a Kimberly Ellinger fan page in here somewhere.

What’s to be done?  First, obviously, data hygiene in all media:

• Enter every bad address – mail and email — in your database as a bounce as soon as you can. For the mail, this will save on postage; for email, it will help your emails not be seen as spam (and, even better, it will help your emails actually not be spam).
  In his Guide last week Roger listed two free sources you can use to see how clean your mailing list is.)

• Track these bad addresses to their origin. If you get a bunch of your acquisition packages back, find out what list(s) the pieces came from.  If it’s one or two, that’s life.  If you are getting a bunch of return to senders back, you can ask for a refund from the list and/or not use that list again.
• Search your database for common swear and hate words. It may shock you but not everyone on the Internet is a mature, upstanding member of society.  I have seen things in online databases (which are usually user entered) that would make longshoremen blush.  Most of these are attempts to see more adult versions of “Dear Mr. Poopyfacehead” in print — I would describe this as adolescent except for my desire not to besmirch adolescents.  However, some may put real people’s addresses on with these abhorrent names; woe be unto you if you mail them as such.
• Similarly, look for ZIP codes of 11111, 12345, 0, and the like, as well as popular phone numbers like 123-456-7890 or 111-111-1111 and emails like xxx@xxx.com. Delete them.
• Once you’ve taken out the bad data, delete accounts that don’t have the bare minimum necessary for inclusion, which should likely be a physical address, a phone number, or an email address. I once saw a mailing addressed only to “Roy.”  Nothing else.  My guess is Roy wasn’t going to get it.

More than this, try to have real relationships with your donors.

On one end of the spectrum, that means giving up.  As we discuss here, if Kimberly Ellinger hasn’t answered your first 50 mailings, number 51 probably isn’t going to sway her

On the other end of the spectrum, organizations that are constantly trying to learn more about their donors – why they donate, are they satisfied, what do they want, who they are – don’t fall into these traps as much.  Why?  Because Kimberly Ellinger won’t answer these and neither will her undeliverable, unengaged, sometimes non-existent brethren/sisterhood.

The Kimberly Ellingers of the world give lie to donorcentricism.  If we pay, pray, and spray at someone who doesn’t exist, what hope do those of us who do exist have?

Nick

P.S. As I wrote this Roger was hammering away on a new soapbox he calls “Data Stewardship” So, you can look forward to more on this woefully ignored subject.