Update phone numbers and e-mails

Julie Cooney

Good morning,


We are finding that a lot of the contact information on our constituents is not current.  What do you find the best way to up date this information is?  We did an e-mail finder a couple years back and that did not prove to be productive. 


Thank you! 

Anne Herbert

We’ve done landline, cell phone and email
append services.  All of them have issues, but you do find
some individuals correct information.  We always put in the
comments of the phone area where we got the information (kind of
like Info Source for addresses, but without a table drop
down).  Knowing the source lets us know that it may not be
valid.  We quickly find out which phones are bad during our
phonathons. Another option if you are importing these is to use a
new phone type that makes it clear it’s from a service, but then
you need to change that when you know it’s valid – which  may
be too cumbersome, but we did it for a cell phone append since we
knew we would be calling them and updating individually.

 

I’ve found email services to be the worst,
because they pull from sources such as online purchases and often
teen’s use their parent’s card, but their own email – for example
my boss had her son’s email come across for her.  I review the
emails before loading and throw out the obviously wrong ones before
I import them.

 

Unfortunately you cannot import phone
comments/dates, you can only enter them one-by-one.  I brought
this up when we beta tested the new phone grid, but that didn’t go
anywhere.  There is an idea in the idea bank RE7-I-3391 –
Ability to Import Phone Comments and Phone Dates if you want to
vote for it.

 

 

Melissa S Graves

EmailFinder is opt in - so an email goes out to the constituent by Blackbaud and the recipient agrees to get emails from you before you get the list to import. The teenage son must have gotten the email and agreed not knowing that his email was connected to his parent (I do not know if the email is personalized as "Dear Melissa,"). It is not just randomly found on a list and sent to you.


All "finder" services are for sweep up cleaning in my opinion but can not take the place of routine ways to encourage your constituents to give you their info. Offer a compelling email newsletter they have to sign up for. Do a match campaign where all online gifts (with required email address) are matched by a donor. Have them sign up for text alerts. Collect contact information on cards at events. Getting the information yourself is always better AND more transparent to your donors when they are contacted in that way. 

Julie Cooney

Thank you Anne for
your insight!  Have a great day!

--

Julie L.
Cooney

Cardinal Spellman High
School

508-584-3004 ext 1822

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Alan French

Anne Herbert:

Unfortunately you cannot import phone comments/dates, you can only enter them one-by-one.  I brought this up when we beta tested the new phone grid, but that didn’t go anywhere.  There is an idea in the idea bank RE7-I-3391 – Ability to Import Phone Comments and Phone Dates if you want to vote for it.

We're on 7.96 and can import phone comments; in fact I did so about an hour ago with a list of bounces from our latest email (can't import the phone date, but that updates itself). Are you on 7.94/7.95?