NCOA (National Change of Address) and other ways to manage the hygiene of your mailing list
In this article:
Background
The United States Postal Service operates a national change of address database, which lists address changes for people who opt into that service. That database is regularly updated. In the past, when LGL offered an NCOA service to our customers, customers typically received updated addresses on around 5% of their constituents for whom they had home addresses. Most organizations would not do this on a regular basis, so that 5% change likely took at least 12 months to occur. And, as a reminder, the NCOA process will only find changes that have actively been registered with USPS by constituents who moved to a new address.
While the NCOA process can help you maintain a more accurate mailing list, it is by no means a cure all, and because of that we strongly recommend implementing the other suggestions in this article if you want to maintain the accuracy of your data.
NCOA integration for LGL
TrueGivers is a data processing platform that includes an automated, ongoing NCOA review of your mailing list. TrueGivers has built an integration with LGL, so you don’t need to manage data exporting and importing to get NCOA updates.
See TrueGivers.com for more information, and this page in particular about the LGL integration.
Other recommendations for maintaining your data hygiene
Running your list through the NCOA database is not the only way, or even necessarily the best way, to maintain the hygiene of your mailing list.
Here are four steps we recommend, (the first two of which just require turning on an option in your LGL account):
- Activate address verification in your account, for free. LGL is integrated with a service provider called Smarty, which runs automatically in the background. This process confirms if an address is deliverable in the U.S. (NOTE: This feature does not work for non-U.S. addresses). Smarty does not provide identifying information about who is at the address, so it is not a substitute for NCOA. But it does standardize the syntax of your address to match USPS preferences, including adding the +4 to zip codes.
- Enable automatic address and phone number deduplication. LGL will help you avoid ending up with duplicate addresses within the same constituent record. This can easily happen if a donor enters their address using a slightly different format (for example, if they use “St” instead of “Street”). But if you turn on the Smarty option (see the prior bullet point), then your addresses will be standardized and LGL will be able to de-dupe very effectively within a given constituent record.
- Send a large-scale first-class mailing at least once a year, and allocate time to review returned envelopes and update addresses in your LGL account.
- Build a relationship with a mail house that can help you improve your efficiency and effectiveness. A good mail house can help you create and print mailings, get the best prices from USPS, and manage the NCOA process on your list. Shop around for one with experience working with nonprofits.