There are plenty of online resources for finding genealogical documents. One of those resources is The Social Security Death Index (SSDI). Provided by the Unites States Social Security Administration, the SSDI can help universities, schools or non-profits find Social Security Death Records, which contain information on anyone whose death has been reported to the U.S. Social Security Administration. The SSDI is one of the largest indexes in the world and a vital tool for any family history researcher or enthusiast.

It’s also free. However, this free resource has become less and less accurate.

Why? The Social Security Administration recently made changes to the public Death Master File—the source of the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) — which will now impact your research.

Since November 1, the Death Master File no longer contains “protected” records the SSA receives from states. 4.2 million of the 89 million deaths in the Death Master File were removed, and approximately 1 million fewer deaths will be added each year.

Most universities, schools or non-profits use the SSDI list for mailings, which means there could be an increase on inadvertently mailing to deceased individuals, as well as increased costs on printing and postage.

The good news is there’s a solution: AlumniFinder’s Deceased Append. The file contains the names of over 40 million deceased individuals from one of the most reliable data resources out there. The append will accurately identify only those individuals’ names that should be suppressed and removed from a mailing list.

This not only improves your response rate, but also lowers costs, and can help improve a company’s image by showing sensitivity to this important issue. 

Budget season is upon us. With a rapidly changing media landscape, many marketers are re-evaluating how they allocate their marketing dollars. How is your budget changing for 2012? Will you take back TV dollars? Spend on social? Move more to mobile? Invest in innovation? Chief Marketer recently asked top marketing professionals to give their opinion in several key areas of spending.  Below is the top 6:

SOCIAL
For 2012, marketing will explore how social media can be proactively managed. Understanding how marketing dollars will shift from one-way advertising to building and developing relationships is one of the keys to a successful social media marketing investment. Elements such as geo-targeted social media conversations, and social feedback will allow marketers to go beyond simply cultivating and distributing content.

DIRECT MAIL
Mail continues to be the best way for marketers to identify and reach out to prospects. As mail volume is down, the chances of being noticed are even better. Targeted mail will be used by smart marketers to build their customer base. It will also be used after a contact by a prospect was made. It works wonders in taking the engagement started by social media to a marriage by closing the sale. Personalization is also more cost effective than ever before, which makes mail a wise spend. Don’t forget to test mail on the back-end.

EMAIL
A significant portion of your email-marketing budget should be designated to analytics and multichannel efforts. Make sure every dollar spent is yielding results and supporting your marketing—and ultimately your business—goals. Engage with analytics to determine if your email, social or mobile programs drive in-store or online shopping. While a direct click may not be immediately ascertainable, is there behavior to show increased awareness with these sends that drive “soft” foot traffic?

DATABASE
It is important to sound an alarm if a company is looking to throw huge sums of money at technology and small sums of money at ensuring that the data content is of the highest quality. What stories is your data telling you? Invest in understanding your customer, prospect and lapsed customers, by each channel you use. Be sure your data is up to date otherwise you’re throwing money out the door. It’s the surest way for you to market smarter and pick- up on trends within your own customer files. It also leads to more intelligent prospecting.

LOYALTY
With the increased influence of “deal of the day” offerings popularized by Groupon, and greater adoption of smart phones, consumers want to access loyalty programs the same way they now bank or redeem discounts—wherever and whenever they want. It’s an “on demand” world, and loyalty program owners need to respond to this by investing into the mobile space and restructuring the reward mix to offer more immediate, short-term wins.

SEO
Within the next five years, more people will access the Web via mobile devices than PCs, and tablets will outsell desktops. The portion of paid search impressions coming from mobile devices crossed the 10% threshold in 2011 and won’t slow down any time soon. Plus, mobile paid search still delivers results similar to desktop paid search for about half the cost. For 2012, mobile and tablet investment in the form of apps, content, media and promotions should be a growing portion of your digital and overall marketing spend.

Do you include direct mail in your marketing mix? Are you planning on sending more direct mail in 2012?  With the USPS announcement of the postage hike effective January 22nd, 2012 a number of large direct mailers will need to start thinking about reallocating their budget…or decreasing DM spending.

Let’s reflect on ways to optimize direct mail programs to help save money and explore some smart and easy ways to decrease your mail spend and increase response rates. Talk about a win/win proposition!

Segment Data. By segmenting your database, you’ll be able to quickly discover buckets of opportunity ranging from the most profitable customers to the highest potential prospects. It’s important to allocate marketing dollars wisely, and not waste the budget on messages that will fall on deaf ears.

Clean house. Running an NCOA on a mailing list could save you sometimes thousands on undelivered mail. Use this updated data with correct mailing addresses to cleanse your database and maintain a high quality list.

Craft Relevant Messaging. As a direct marketer, the goal is to illicit response. Not only do you need to find the right audience, you also need to hit them with a relevant message that will get them to act on an offer. Incorporating strategies such as personalization and human behavior response triggers into copy and design can improve response rates and ultimately increase revenue.

Only mail to occupied households. Determine if an address can be confirmed as a valid delivery point by the USPS. A simple process confirms if the address is occupied and actually able to receive mail.

Incorporate email marketing. You can append email addresses to your house file.  Using email as a complement to your direct mail campaigns can really boost your brand exposure and response rates.  And with email, there is virtually no production, materials or postage expense.

Pay Attention to Shape. The anticipated rates would give mailers a strong financial incentive to switch from flat (9×12-inch) envelopes to standard #10 envelopes, reflecting the U.S. Postal Service’s lower costs for processing the smaller envelopes. Folding and inserting machines to capitalize on this incentive will make sense for more organizations under the proposed new rules.

Make sure you Track and Segment Your Data first.

You’ve committed to running a new annual giving campaign but you’re not entirely sure how to manage it or obtain new donors.

 The first thing you should do is look back at last year’s results in order to refine this year’s activities. You’re in a prime position if you can refer back to the data. If you can’t, this is all the more reason why it’s so important to have reliable methods for collecting, tracking and analyzing your data. After all, the more you can learn about your audience and what compels them to give, the better you’ll become at personalizing and targeting your annual giving campaigns to maximize your return!

 Here are some quick tips for using technology to support successful, long-term annual giving campaigns:

Is your data up-to-date?

If you sent a mailing to your entire donor database, what percentage would be returned as undeliverable? If that happened, do you have a process for updating your database as a result?

Your donor database is only as helpful as you make it. Data Append Services can help ensure that your donor records are up to date and aren’t missing important information. Regardless of whether you do an append, if a mailing is returned as undeliverable, mark it in the database; if you have an email on record for that person, contact them to ask for an updated mailing address.

Dedupe your data regularly. As new records are added, some will be duplicates. If you stay on top of this with a regular process, it will be simple to maintain. An NCOA is a good start, but not quite enough. A variety of supplementary services can help you improve your campaign results and reduce costs.

Segment your data

To truly customize your communications – including cultivation and solicitation communications – you need to segment your data.

There are segmentation tools available that quickly indentify donors, sporadic donors and non-donors with the highest propensity to give. These same tools also have the ability to acquire appropriate ask amounts based on a donors ability to give. Once you have a clear picture of your donors, you can better focus your efforts on obtaining these gifts.

Promote using various channels

What good is an annual campaign if nobody knows about it? Research shows that multi-channel communications with donors result in more regular, larger donations. Social Media is also becoming a more widely used option. If you’re not sure how to integrate social media into your marketing mix, here are a few tips:

• Add links to your social media channels on your organization’s website. A simple Facebook or Twitter link can get potential donors to your social media channels to learn about your organization or cause.
• You know how tricky email marketing is – particularly when it comes to getting people to open and read it. So, when they do, throw in a reference to your social media channels, and what the reader will gain by visiting it.
• In advertising, encourage people to go to your Facebook Page. When you advertise in a radio spot or place an ad in a magazine, your call to action could be “Like us on Facebook” or “Be sure to retweet us on Twitter.” These simple phrases can go on anything: window clings, yellow pages, kiosks, brochures, fliers, etc.
• Traditional media’s influence is waning, especially print and television news. So instead of investing the resources contacting newspapers and dealing with reporting staff, post your press release as a note on Facebook.  You can also pull quotes and important information from the press release and put them on Twitter with links to the full release on Facebook.

AccuData participated in this year’s Hearst Analytical Challenge.  There were over 500 teams worldwide, including leading colleges and universities.  Sponsored by the Hearst Corporation and judged by the Wharton School of Business, the competition’s objective was to gain insight into top modeling techniques from some of the best in the analytical community.

This year’s challenge entailed predicting which of Heart’s emails would be opened and which would be clicked on. There were over 1.7 million records provided, along with timestamps for each email and demographic data.

Knowing that the best predictive data is transaction-type data, we focused on parsing what little transaction-type data was provided.  The timestamp field was our focus. We created individual fields for the day mailed, time of day mailed, days since last mailed, day since last open, day since last click, and a variety of chronological, lag, and cumulative predictors.

Using an advanced modeling technique, called stochastic gradient boosting, we were able to detect the little nuances that were actually statistically significant differences between those that opened an email and those that did not. We repeated the same for the ‘click’ component of the challenge.

After literally thousands of iterative models, we could not improve upon what we had.  So the next step was to determine what the probability score cutoff was going to be, in order to determine if a record would be included as an ‘open,’ or a ‘click’ – or a ‘not open’ or a ‘not click.’  This was stage of the process was much more creative than scientific.  After applying a variety of ‘cutoff combinations,’ we applied our learnings to our holdout sample.  (We always use holdout samples to test the accuracy of our models.) 

The results were that our prediction was more than 98% correct overall.  As a result, we decided to upload our solution in the ‘validation’ round of the challenge.  We initially were in 10^th place.  Not bad.  We did a few more tweaks to the cutoff combinations (truly a creative exercise), and now found ourselves in 4^th place.

As a former football player, I learned that if you don’t win, you lose – and also learned the ‘no pain, no gain’ philosophy.  So, we decided to go for it and use our revised model – either we’d end up in first place or possibly plummet to last.  Nevertheless, we knew we had built a worthy model.  In the end, we dropped back to 10^th place.

I don’t play football anymore.  So, I’m going to throw away that ‘if you don’t win, you lose’ mentality.  However, I’ll keep the ‘no pain, no gain’ attitude and accept that a top-10 finish ahead of over 500 leading teams from around the world is a good place to be!

Did you know non-profits could loose their mail discounts because of the USPS’s cost cutting measures? New legislation would gradually lower the discount on postage rates nonprofits have been receiving since 1951. According to the “Postal Reform Act of 2011,” introduced by Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), the nonprofit advertising discount would be reduced by five percent a year, and 10-percent after six years. Currently, eligible nonprofits in America receive a 40-percent discount on postage rates, which has been criticized since most foundations use direct mail fundraising to garner support. Some say the new rates would cripple nonprofits– and ultimately punish the USPS, with less mail. But Congress argues it would save them $1.7 billion dollars.  The USPS is expected to lose more than $8 billion this year, and another $8 billion in the coming year if no changes are made soon.

The Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers has asked the association and its members to contact Congressman Issa and other members of the House of Representatives to let them know of the devastating effect the elimination would have on nonprofits’ ability to serve American society.

At AlumniFinder, we focus our energy helping our clients retain the donors that they have, while helping search for new donors so as not to burden current ones.

Fundraising is hard. It’s like panning for gold. You shift through rock after rock, sending direct mail, having special events, trying to find that rare donor or stone that can make a difference. Finding some of that gold may be easier than you think…

Thousands of companies in the U.S. maintain a matching gifts program. If you aren’t aware of which companies match their employees’ donations, you may be missing a significant amount of money that’s available to your organization.

Why are matching gifts an important source of income for non-profits and universities? It’s free money! And in these difficult times, anything you can do to maximize giving is a good thing.

Matching gifts is frequently overlooked by nonprofits and universities, mostly due to the fact that they didn’t realize there was software available to help find these individuals. So what steps can you take to maximize matching gifts?

Well for starters you need access to critical information and that’s how AlumniFinder can help. Our People at Work service helps identify new donors and find out who qualifies for a matching gift. Through this service we’ve increased Annual Giving through matching gift companies without increasing the burden on donors. We obtain our data from UCC files of over 680M records, corporate files and other data sources so the information is reliable.

So find the true value of your data with complete and accurate donor records.

Find out more about AlumniFinder’s People at Work service.

 We have some national organizations that are relatively new to applying predictive models to their fundraising campaigns. It is not uncommon to observe them pre-deciding markets without considering regional cultures.  Consequently, their fundraising efforts often excel in some markets and don’t do so well in others. How do we handle this?

The starting point is to implement a national model.  The data set should include some sort of market or regional indicator (e.g. Metropolitan Statistical Area, ‘MSA’).  After the results come in, the data can be parsed by the market/regional indicator and the campaign results analyzed on that basis.  What does this do for you? 

This approach will allow you to compare and contrast performance by market.  You may find some similarities among markets. In this case, you can combine those markets for targeted treatment – starting with a predictive model built specifically for that market.  Unique markets that do not act like others get ‘teased’ out.  Strategic decisions can then be made as to the feasibility of giving those unique markets special treatment.  For example, using this approach for a national client, we were able to tease out underperforming markets that included smaller MSAs in Texas such as Austin and Portland, OR.

By taking this approach you can use your budget most efficiently while continuously refining your targeted fundraising for maximum performance.

Day one as CEO of AccuData.   I open my front door, full of anticipation of what the day would bring. All of a sudden a red, black and yellow object flashes by my eyes, narrowly missing my head. It hits the porch in front of me, and then rears its head up and sticks out its tongue!

Not used to such things, I did what any self-respecting Englishman would do under these circumstances.  I grabbed my trusty umbrella, used it as a sword and eventually chased the snake into the bushes.  After regaining my composure and having a good laugh about it with my family, I finally drove off to AccuData.

I’m pleased to report that the rest of the day was up hill from there.  We spent an exhilarating day talking with staff, clients and partners about the deal that was just signed between AccuData and Compact.  It was particularly nice to be able to tell people that this is one of those deals full of good news – with no code-speak for layoffs, reorgs or other unpleasant things.

But, clearly, this type of news has a way of filling everyone’s heads with a million questions.  People wanted to know how the news would affect them personally and the organization as a whole, as well as clients and partners.

We took each question one by one.  We reflected on how fortunate AccuData has been to emerge from the economic downturn in a position of strength ­­– much stronger than many of its competitors.  How lucky we are to have particularly loyal client and partner relationships, dedicated and talented staff, as well industry-leading offerings — including its data assets, marketing analytics and database marketing technology. 

I shared with the team how I believed that AccuData has been poised to accelerate its growth, and how this new relationship provides exactly the right combination of financial and technical resources to move the company to an even stronger competitive position. 

Then, we talked about my ideas for how we can work together to build on the success of this company.  As CEO, I felt that the meeting wouldn’t be complete without making a few requests.

First, I asked that all employees – as well as clients and partners – provide honest input and share their ideas with me as I get to know the organization.  I promised to do a lot of listening and ask a lot of questions.  I want people to know how much I honestly value their opinions and perspectives.  And how I will use this input as I work with the executive team to update our strategic plan for the coming years.

My second request is that employees continue to make their best effort to provide our clients with highest quality service possible.  This is the heart and soul of this company – and it will always be the source of our success.

In return, I thought it was only fair to make a couple of promises.  First, I promised to be accessible when employees, clients and partners need me.  And second, I promised to do my best to be fair and reward people’s best efforts.

 I told the team that if we all stay focused on these things that we can and will do great things together – and make a big difference for our clients, partners and the industry as a whole.

As I left the office that night, I was exhausted.  But, I was also full of excitement about becoming part of such a terrific team.  Strangely, I already felt very much at home – at least until I heard the weather report.  Sounds like I shouldn’t put away my umbrella too fast after all.  This weekend will be my first tropical storm.  But, at least I feel at the center of it all.

Cheers,
Rich

Cause-related marketing is arguably one of the first “fields” that brought the non-profit and for-profit worlds together for mutual benefit. Most marketers credit the partnership between Marriott Corporation and the March of the Dimes, with originating, “cause marketing” as we know it today — the combination of corporate, charity, celebrity and cause brands, all coming together to create value for and engage consumers with social change campaigns.

March of the Dimes’ goal was to increase fundraising for its chapters in the Western U.S., and Marriott’s goal was to generate cost-effective PR and media coverage for the opening of their family entertainment complex, Marriott’s Great America in Santa Clara, California. The campaign was a hit. Since then, these types of cause marketing campaigns have generated a slew of money for non-profit causes.

One of the major brands that have embraced this type of marketing is Coca-Cola. Their Live Positively campaign is about redesigning the way they work and live to bring sustainability into the DNA of the company and its brands. To do this authentically, it takes a lot of time and a lot of investment.

Recently, they used a unique approach to blend a sweepstakes and a cause marketing effort in an email campaign designed to help restore national parks. It’s a nice departure from the standard emails pitching the brand’s beverages. The message features solid calls-to-action and commands attention with its catchy subject line. They also utilize social media by encouraging recipients to tweet the message or “like” with icons in the email.

I give Coke credit for finding a creative way to engage a large audience with its corporate responsibility mantra. Their Live Positively message now represents Coke’s overarching sustainability strategy and brand. More than 4 million people and counting are now connected to what could become the company’s permanent good works feed.