NCOA Update UK Best Practice

Nicola Rendell

Hi Everyone

We're looking into using NCOA Update in our UK based organisation.

We'd be interested in hearing how other charities/organisations manage this.

We have a large database (350,000 active records, 800,000+ including Inactive) and have a variety of ways a supporter can update their address on our database.

We are concerned that using NCOA Update might over write a more recent address we hold for the supporter.


How often do you run your database against NCOA?

How do you record the NCOA Address on RE?

Has it been significantly beneficial to use this dataset?


Any advice or opinions would be greatly appreciated!

Kind Regards

Nicky

Phillip Bicknell

Nicola Rendell:

Hi Everyone

We're looking into using NCOA Update in our UK based organisation.

We'd be interested in hearing how other charities/organisations manage this.

We have a large database (350,000 active records, 800,000+ including Inactive) and have a variety of ways a supporter can update their address on our database.

We are concerned that using NCOA Update might over write a more recent address we hold for the supporter.


How often do you run your database against NCOA?

How do you record the NCOA Address on RE?

Has it been significantly beneficial to use this dataset?


Any advice or opinions would be greatly appreciated!

Kind Regards

Nicky

Nicky,


Not used it, sorry, but one immediate thought - is it GDPR compliant? There's a bit about it on:
https://www.royalmail.com/business/services/marketing/data-optimisation/ncoa-update

"The NCOA Update file is built from our Redirection Service data and uses information taken directly from the Redirection application forms of people who are moving. So your customers have already given us permission to forward their new contact details to organisations that have their old information."


Assuming that it is, then hopefully you can still control the data-flow. So you would presumably be supplying RM with a file of names and addresses and they'll respond with new addresses. When you import, you can set the new address type to some temporary name and then run queries to see if the constituents with new RM addresses seem to have still been corresponding with you from their supposedly old address. Then once your satisfied you can edit the address types and Preferred by a second import.