Return to sender: college fundraisers have discovered that the database management of mailings can have a greater impact on the ultimate success of campaigns than anyone may have imagined. Enter address reclamation - Database Management & Integration

University Business, August, 2003 by Matt Villano

As a fundraiser for Washington State University, Steve Schauble spends roughly $1 million to send donation solicitations to more than 150,000 alumni every year. Generally, the campaign is a smashing success--in the four years from 1998 to 2001, the school received an average of 23,000 pledges at roughly $100 apiece, for a return of nearly $2.3 million. In 2002, however, the news was even better. Despite a sagging economy, the average pledge rose by $10, netting the school an additional $230,000. On paper, it was WSU's best fundraising effort in history.

But these numbers tell only one side of the story. While the 2002 campaign netted higher average pledges than ever before, thousands upon thousands of pieces of Literature were returned to the Pullman, WA-based school, marked undeliverable. Some of the pieces were simply mailed to old addresses. Others had addresses that were incomplete, or addresses that simply did not exist. Between the return postage and the cost of themselves, Schauble estimates the school lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the undeliverable pieces alone. That's not even including what the batch might have yielded if the pieces had reached the potential donors to whom they were addressed in the first place.

"If one out of every 100 former students becomes a million-dollar donor someday, you want to reach as many of them as you possibly can," notes Schauble, vice president of Finance for the WSU Foundation, an independent not-for-profit fundraising organization affiliated with the school. "When it comes to fundraising, it is our mission to leave no stone unturned."

As Schauble explains, in the world of fundraising, every dollar counts. Donations build endowments, endowments build rich programs and curricula, and these offerings attract top students. The students, in turn, graduate, earn, and feed the endowments all over again. Especially in a tough economy, this cycle can be critical to a school's survival. Whether former students donate $10,000 or $10 each year, it's important to keep track of them as accurately as possible, and to ensure that every mailing or solicitation reaches its intended recipient.

Indeed, at colleges and universities across the country, alumni relations and fundraising directors are just beginning to realize that capital campaigns are no better than the records you have to support them. In response, these administrators are turning to a process called "address reclamation" to clean up their data and right their ships. This process, administered by a variety of third-party organizations, hinges on a number of technologies that compare existing address databases against established sources of verified address information. At a bare minimum, these organizations correct errors and incomplete data as they go along; at best, they improve the data and seek to leverage it across a number of platforms down the road.

"If employed efficiently, this technology could save colleges and universities big, big bucks," says Arthur Tisi, president and CEO of @Thought Technology Corp. (www.atthought.com), a high-tech services and strategy company that consults for a variety of nonprofit organizations. "What kind of [school] administrator wouldn't be interested in that?"

THE MASTER LIST

By their nature, recent graduates are a hard group to pin down, address-wise. Conservative estimates indicate that the average alumnus moves three times in the first five years after graduation, making address management a Herculean undertaking for any alumni relations department. The best departments use telephone and e-mail campaigns to encourage alumni to update their current addresses whenever they move. Still, when life gets in the way, alumni forget to update information, their addresses become inaccurate, and thousands of addresses fall through the cracks.

Yet, the information isn't lost to everyone. When alumni (or any individuals for that matter) move from place to place, the U.S. Postal Service requires them to fill out a permanent change of address form to facilitate mail forwarding. The Postal Service records this information and enters it into an enormous database, otherwise known as the National Change of Address database, or NCOA. According to DeWitt Crawford, program manager for the Address Change Service Department, this database contains more than 150 billion permanent address changes, and is therefore the Holy Grail of up-to-the-minute address information overall.

"We call it the 'Granddaddy' of personal contact information," says Crawford, who is based in Memphis, TN. "If you want to know anybody's most current address, as long as that person has a mailbox and receives mail, he's in the NCOA database."

Once an alumnus enters a new address into the NCOA database, the database automatically creates a file for that individual, which remains in the database for four years. Every time an alumnus adds a new address, it is added to his or her personal file. Interested parties can search a particular file for all of the previous address listed there, or they can search the file for the most recent, up-to-date data. Across the board, address reclamation search perform this latter chore, comparing a dresses in a school's database with the latest information from the NCOA.