Essentials Magazine Essentials Spring 2018 | Page 28

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sk any service bureau manager which files are the “dirtiest”
and the response you get will always be the house or customer
files. They get that way for two main reasons: one, the database
they are housed in doesn’t have enough fields to accommodate the
data that must be kept on file; and, two, the data entry clerks are too
pressed for time to enter data in a consistent manner.
Maintaining clean and accurate data
regarding your customers and inquirers
is important for a number of reasons.
It saves money whenever you make a
mailing to your customers, it makes a
good impression on customers, and it
improves your opportunity to identify
other educators who teach in the same
district or school as your customers.
28 essentials | spring 2018
School and District Data
is a Challenge
School and district addresses repre-
sent a challenge to maintaining a clean
customer file. Most companies that use
direct mail to support their sales usual-
ly rent educator names and addresses
from an education database company
and then merge and purge their own
house files of customers and inquirers
so as not to send two promotions when-
ever their house file names are also on
the rented files.
When names and addresses are
inaccurate or placed in the wrong fields
they are much more difficult to dedu-
plicate from names and addresses rent-
ed from a database company. Conse-
quently, two records that represent the
same individual can survive the merge/
purge process that takes place prior to
creating the final mail file.
There are some legitimate chal-
lenges in eliminating duplicates. For
example, many school names are
longer than most databases can accom-
modate. Often they have to be abbre-
viated and this makes the school or