Data Health Center - your experience?

EmailFinder is okay for getting an updated email address for people who have already opted in to your mailings, but is otherwise pretty useless and possibly dangerous (search the forums for my previous comments).


AddressFinder, to the best of my knowledge, uses the same NCOA data from USPS that your mail house would use, so there's little chance you'd get better data, but it (normally) is much easier to use than external lists because it interfaces really well with RE.  I say "normally" because right now the system is undergoing some extensive maintenance (that has been going on for months and still isn't completed) and you have to jump through a series of hoops to manually upload, download, and apply the changes.  If you want to use the service I'd advise either waiting until the new servers are functioning or using the down period as a bargaining chip to get a reduced price.

We've been using Address Finder (4+ times/year) for many years and have not had any of the issues Gracie describes. In fact, it is pretty invaluable to send a mailing and have it reach the intended destination instead of relying on the USPS forwarding info and resending.


Of all the services we use, Address Accelerator is by far the best and yes it has some limitations but to get consistency with every USA address has eliminated a lot of time spent checking addresses, making sure ZIPs and states match up. We just started Phone and E-Mail Finder this year and would agree that we are a little concerned about the number of e-mail addresses returned. We nearly doubled our e-mail addresses from 13,000 to over 23,000. We are being cautious with our Mail Chimp subscription so we aren't risking any massive unsubscribes.


For the last 2-3 years, Deceased Finder has been used but I'm not overly sold on it. Essentially, you have to verify if the individuals with a deceased attribute are actually deceased.


Hope that helps.

I love using Address Finder and Address Accelerator.  I will say that using them, especially the first time can lead you to many duplicate addresses in your system.  You can clean them up using an Export/Import system, but it will take some time (depending on how many records you have overall).


I have never had the NCOA issues that others have described.  I don't know all the specifics of their data or situation, so I don't want to speak to that, but I believe that I have maintained more addresses by using the process than not.


Also - I used to work at a Post Office extension center and just because you're not getting your bulk mail returned doesn't mean that it is reaching it's intended destination.  If you don't send bulk/non-profit mail with a Return Requested or Address Service Requested, they don't HAVE to send it back to you and all of the bad addresses are just going in the trash/recycling (not first class!!).  Policy may have changed since then, but I think it is very likely the same.

We have had good experiences with data cleansing services. That said, if you have any experience with Importing, then oftentimes BB is overpriced. As I have stated in previous posts, we paid only $250 for a phone append through our name rental house, and a similarly low price for a deceased records finder and age append, when BB had quoted several hundred dollars higher. BB does offer some services that are hard to get through a mail house though, and we did go with BB's Data Health Center for EmailFinder and PeopleFinder services.


There will always be some inaccuracies in the data. The Age Append was usually correct for the birthyear and birthmonth, but was usually wrong on the actual day of the month. So, we only selectively imported the month/year without the day, and added an Attribute to mark which records had been appended so we would know there was a margin for error.


The NCOA and PeopleFinder services were terriffic in that we located hundreds of "lost" Alumni and other donors. However, NCOA has occasionally given us a wrong address, so with the wisdom of hindsight, I'd recommend NOT running NCOA on any records where the donor has already been in communication with you in the past year and has a strong relationship with your org. If the donor has been corresponding to you recently, more likely than not, your data entry people should have noticed a changed address on the return envelope, check, or online registration, so you probably already have the most current address on files in your system.