We don't know about you, but since starting to work from home our homes have become MUCH cleaner! Work-from-home has been great for our laundry situation, our bathrooms are looking much cleaner and we've even been taking part in some purging. Having an efficient workspace makes our jobs easier. Now that our homes are our offices, we know that we are much more efficient (and much happier) when our workspaces are clean and organized.
The same can be said for a clean database. If you’re looking to increase the efficiency of your ResultsPlus database and are finding that you have a little more time on your hands to do the clean-up that you’ve been putting off—and I don’t mean closets—consider doing a duplicate check and eliminating those duplicate records from your database. Lucky for ResultsPlus users, a duplicate checking function is built right into the software. This tool is a great way to identify duplicates and then merge them so that you don't lose valuable information.
ResultsPlus users: To find out more about this topic go to your How To tab in ResultsPlus and click on the All Topics button. Under Maintaining Your ResultsPlus Database > Finding and Merging Duplicate Constituent Records, you will find instructions for performing the search for duplicates, as well as merging them together.
Feeling like you're on a roll? Another database cleaning item is having a National Change of Address (NCOA) update run on your database. Your local mail house likely does this for you when you send out mailings, but quite often we hear that those addresses aren’t returned. Now is a good time to have that work done so that you can import the updated addresses. And now that hosting events and visiting donors is pretty much off the table, having up-to-date addresses is more important than ever. This NCOA check is a service we offer here, but others offer it as well.
With the service we offer, we don’t just get back the updated addresses of those who moved, but all of the addresses that are returned as good address are CASS certified, so they are standardized and given the plus-four zip code values, as well. Incidentally, after all these addresses (the moves and the CASS certified addresses) are imported, it’s an excellent time to run the duplicate check. You might have had duplicates in the system, one with a good address and the other with an old address. After the update is imported, the addresses should be the same and thus would be caught as a duplicate by the duplicate check. If you are interested in an NCOA update, send an email to rphelp@metafile.com or call the support line and talk with a technician.
Whether your reason is working from home, end-of-year or a fundraising revamp, there's never a wrong time to do a database clean-up!