The Deep Clean

Here we examine three major stages to increasing and taking advantage of database depth.

Stage 1. Increase reachability
Core to every record is basic contact information, such as e-mail, phone and mailing address. These enable corresponding outreach campaigns in the most rudimentary sense.

Since, generally, people do not donate unless they are asked to, if they cannot be reached, then they will not donate. The metric to optimize here is “reachability,” namely, how many of the contacts can be reached right now. This number decreases over time not because the database is broken, but because the world is changing around it. People move, change jobs, get married, etc. This is called “data rot” and is one of the most common reducers of reachability.