Do Not Send Mail Checkbox and Solicit Codes

Lauren Fardella 3 · May 2021

Hi,

How do you determine your solicit codes and the option to not send mail to a consituents home?

Currently, we code those who want to receive no solicitations or mail from us anymore as a Do Not Solicit code.

But we have a handful of people that we recently discovered not getting pulled into acknowledgements or mailings because the "Do Not Send Mail" box is checked on the address tab.

My question is why would you mark a do not mail box as opposed to using a solicit code?

JoAnn Strommen · May 2021

Lots of options out there for handling 'do not mail' - the biggest thing is set a procedure and be consistent.

For solicit codes we utilize a 'no mail' separately from 'never solicit'. 'No mail' is for postal mail. Person may still be eligible for phone solicitations or emails. "Never solicit" excludes person from all solicitations - regardless of channel or specific project. While it involves more codes, I find the split between postal mail, email, phone etc quite helpful as a number of folks will accept some but not one specific.

IMO, the checkbox on the address tab for "Send mail to this address" is not directly tied to solicit codes. The box is checked for any valid addresses on the record. Yes, box needs to be checked for acknowledgement/receipts or other items sent by postal mail. For us the only time box is unchecked is result of NCOA reports address not valid/returned mail, person is deceased or an extreme case where we have a person who has expressed such a negative response and requested to be removed from all contact and we want to be sure nothing slips through.

Just how I've used fields - if address is valid, I think most orgs would leave box checked and use solicit codes/consents/attributes to filter out exclusions.

Lauren Fardella 3 · May 2021

This a good explanation...will share with my co workers....thanks!

Faith Murray · May 2021

We will un-check the "Send Mail" box when a donor has multiple addresses on their records and we want to clarify which addresses are defunct or not in use. We keep all historical addresses so that we can verify if a newly acquired address is truly new, or just an old one popping back up. What this means is that a donor may have three old "defunct" addresses, plus a seasonal summer address, plus a primary address, plus a work address on their records. Only the primary one will be marked "Preferred", but all valid addresses (primary, summer, and work) will all be marked "Send Mail" to indicate that they are valid. The old defunct ones will have the "Send Mail" un-checked. This has nothing to do with a donor's solicitation preferences at our org.

Heather MacKenzie · May 2021

My org does the same as Faith Murray‍'s.

Linda Carreira · July 2021

We discovered in order to have the gift receipt print the ending date for no mail has to be removed.

JoAnn Strommen · July 2021

@Linda Carreira, I looked to see if you were outside of the US and are using a different version. (No info on your profile.) Where are you that there is an end date for ‘no mail’?

Christine Cooke 2 · July 2021

In my book of rules Do Not Send Mail is only checked in 3 instances.

1. They are deceased

2. They have said, or for some administrative situational reason your org, has decided to never ever ever contact this person(s)

3. the person(s) on the record has requested to never ever ever be contacted by your org for any reason.

Kelly Bodie · November 2021

This is a helpful discussion! Can I add on a related question?

We use solicit code “do not solicit” for those who should not receive fundraising mail.

We use the “send mail” checkbox = yes to determine a person's mail preference and address validity.

On our most recent NCOA run, a few foundations/government records' addresses were appended with their zip+4. The newly edited address was checked yes, send mail, when really we don't want to mail to them. NCOA did it's job — assuming it wants us to correct bad addresses, but in this case it wasn't really a bad address; it was a mail preference.

How does your org differentiate these?

Do Not Send Mail Checkbox and Solicit Codes

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