Keep It Clean

If you’re a fundraising professional spending a huge chunk of your organization’s precious development budget on direct mail, these figures should make you sleep a little less soundly tonight.

According to the U.S. Postal Service:

• An average of 40 million address changes are registered on the National Change of Address database annually.

• 30 percent of all mail contains address errors.

• Almost 10 percent of all mail pieces have incomplete or incorrect directional/suffix values.

• More than 5 percent have missing or invalid street names and/or numbers.

• An additional 5 percent have incorrect ZIP codes.

• And another 5 percent are missing an apartment number or rural route box number.

With their continued increases, postal rates can represent the greatest cost to a mailer’s campaign. So it’s become even more important to keep your data standardized, and to update or eliminate non-deliverable addresses. Many mailers dedicate much of their time to finding ways to reduce their final price per mailed piece. But between negotiating net name arrangements with brokers for list rental and tailoring the creative portion of the piece to minimize production and printing costs, hygiene might get overlooked as one of the most effective ways to cut significant waste.