Four Common Database Mistakes that Will Derail Your Direct Mail Fundraising Campaigns

By Alan Sharpe, CFRE
I dislike being called Allan, Allen, Mr. Sharp and Mrs. Smith. If you want to please me as a donor, start by getting my name right and follow up by getting my address correct. To do that, avoid these four common mistakes found in most donor databases.

1. Outdated prefixes
Prefixes are the letters placed in front of a person’s name. The most common prefixes are Mr, Mr & Mrs, and Ms. Most donor management software has a prefix field. When you pull a mailing list, the software pulls the prefix field and adds it to the name fields (name_first, name_middle, name_last), so that the first line of your address looks like this: Mr & Mrs Bob Smith.

The most common error with prefixes is forgetting to change the prefix when one of the spouses dies. For example, you have a couple that supports your organization. They are Bob and Ruth Smith. You have one record for this couple. Their prefix is Mr & Mrs. Their address line is Mr & Mrs Bob Smith. Bob dies. You change the first_name field on the donor record from Bob & Ruth to just Ruth but forget to change the prefix field. Now the address line is Mr & Mrs Ruth Smith when it should be Mrs Ruth Smith.

2. C/O names in the Address 1 field
Sometimes you need to mail your donors care-of another person, such as a power of attorney or family member. If your donor management software is typical, it gives you no place to record the care-of person. So you put that information in the Address 1 field, like this:

Bob Smith
C/O Bruce Carruthers
123 Any Street

The problem is, the lettershop that checks your mailing list for address accuracy (using postal-service-approved software)will likely reject these records because the Address 1 field does not contain a valid address.

The solution is to create a care-of field in your database. If that’s not possible, pull your mailing list and clean it up by creating a Name 2 field. Cut the care-of information from the Address 1 field and paste it into this field. Paste the address information that was in Address 2 into Address 1 (which is now empty).

3. One-character salutationsThe salutation field contains the title you address your donors by. On my donor record, the salutation is Alan. Letters addressed to me say: “Dear Alan.” Some donor management software creates salutations automatically by copying the contents of the first_name field. If my first name is Alan, the system automatically puts Alan into the salutation field. If the first_name on my record is Alan & Ruth, the system automatically puts Alan & Ruth into the salutation field.

The most common error with salutations is single character salutations, created when the donor only supplies a first initial, not a first name (on the donor’s cheque, for example). The system automatically puts this single character into the salutation field. You then address your donor as, “Dear B” or “Dear F.” If you cannot find a way to automatically prevent this within your donor management software, search the system for single character salutations and replace them with a formal salutation, such as “Mr Smith” (assuming you know the donor’s gender), or a generic salutation, such as “Friend.”

4. Foreign addresses not flagged as such
Your donor management software should have a country field for each donor record. The easiest way to use this field is to populate it for all donors that live outside your country (the minority) and to leave it blank for all donors who live within your country (the majority). This way, you can easily find all overseas donors by searching for all records that have any data in the country field. Conversely, you can exclude all overseas donors from your domestic mailings by excluding records that have any data in the country field.

The most common mistake with foreign records is an empty country field. This means foreign addresses are included in domestic mailings by mistake. To find these records, search your database for records that have nothing in the country field and have the wrong number of characters in the postal code field. For example, in Canada, we have seven characters in our postal codes. We find foreign addresses by searching for records that have fewer than seven characters (five-character zip codes, for example)or more than seven characters, (nine-character zip codes, for example.