Regular Maintenances - Do you have any to add?

Question, when someone unsubscribed but you do not have a secondary email, how does your org deal with these contacts on EA? Do you delete them? Do you keep them for a certain amount of time and delete later? 

These are great! While it’s not as regular, we also like to occasionally check the pinned notes - are some of them no longer relevant? Are there some that spark an idea for further contact or follow up? This would totally depend on how/how often you use pinned notes, but any sort of “special” feature is good to check. 

We do an annual record reduction that removes contacts with no activity after a certain time period, minus those with contributions or VIP supporters, etc. Typically if email was the ONLY thing on the record, and they unsubbed, they would be deleted after 365 days. One of our ‘keeper’ criteria is if they have opened an email in the past 365 days and they would not fall into that category after unsubscribing. 

Amazing! I love that way of doing it and will be trying to implement that with my team. Thank you!

Hi Lark, what do you most frequently use pinned notes for? 

what kind of notes are others pinning?

I like ​@Andria’s recommendation for that specific use case.

For records for which you don’t have a secondary email but do have other information like address, contribution history, and so on, it might be worth trying to retarget those people to get them to engage with you via another channel: SMS, social media, etc. Direct mail if you do that too.

I think for the biggest bang for your buck, SMS is a channel I would invest in after email, and then various social channels. This blog post from Sea Change Strategies is a real eye-opener about social media platform usage in the 65+ demographic.

Here are a few of our periodic maintenance items:

• Run weekly EA/Excel process to correct capitalization issues in donor names before we send TY letters
• Run periodic Addresses Report for donors and archive old, incorrect, or duplicative addresses
• Run weekly search to catch records with no origin source code and apply correct codes

Jamie I love the idea of fixing capitalization issues. I had never thought of that before! Wondering how many you find are not the correct upper/lower case and do you know why they come in like this? Is it someone filling out a form and not pushing shift so their first and last name start with an uppercase letter? :) 
 

Hi Liz--Yes, they come in when a constituent fills out a form and enters their name as either all lowercase or all uppercase. We want to fix those before we generate letters to mail, and we generally have 20-30 per week that have to be fixed. I came up with a process using Excel and bulk-upload that makes it fairly quick to fix the salutations and envelope names all in one fell swoop!

How do you know if an address is old or incorrect?