Having a database with bad data effects everyone on your team regardless of role. Being a responsive nonprofit means reliable data is crucial for segmentation and personalization in communication to donors. Let's walk through the four pages in the Data Health Tool to help you manage and clean up your data.
To access the Data Health Center, select the shield icon with a plus, pictured below.
Across the top of the page, you will see the four pages to manage in the Data Health Center.
Merge Contacts
Having duplicate data is not ideal. The Merge Contacts tab is the first page to open in the Data Health tool. This page searches through Contact records to find duplicates based on the qualifiers of Address, Phone Number, or Email Address.
Actions
By selecting the Actions drop-down menu in the top right corner, you'll see the different available functions.
- Find Duplicates - This selection will run a full pass through your database to find any potential duplicates. If you have already ran the data health tool, this may add additional records to your existing list.
- Refresh Duplicates - This selection will run a pass through your database to refresh existing duplicates already identified. This is a great option to run as regular maintenance.
- Download - This selection will allow you to download the information of the various duplicates identified to review outside of the Virtuous platform.
- Manually Merge Contacts - This selection will allow you to enter two specific Contact Records to manually merge, rather than depending on the Data Health algorithm matching criteria.
- Bulk Marge Contacts - This selection will allow you to merge a bulk selection of identified duplicates via a CSV file.
- View Ignored Matches - This selection will allow you to review the list of all previously ignored matches. If a match is ignored once, it will not pull as a possible duplicate
Addresses
Having accurate mailing addresses on file is important to reduce the number of paid mail items being delivered. The Addresses tab will identify these incorrect addresses for attention.
Actions
By selecting the Actions drop-down menu in the top right corner, you'll see the different available functions.
- Run Address Data Health - This action will allow you to clean up bad addresses. To learn more about cleaning up bad addresses, check out this Support Article.
- Request NCOA - To learn more about the NCOA process, check out this Support Article.
Review Reasons
If an address is flagged on this page, it will be due to one of the following reasons.
- Partial Address - This address is incomplete. For example an address with city and state data but is missing the street data.
- Accurate latitude and longitude could not be identified for this street address - This does not necessarily mean the address is incorrect. When Virtuous attempted to geocode this address, it was unable to geocode the specific street address.
- Assumed Primary - This address was assumed as the Primary and was not intentionally marked as such. It's best to review any assumptions.
- Duplicate - This exact address exists on more than one Contact record.
- Inaccurate Geocoding - The translated geographical location from the physical address did not accurately match the existing location.
- Failed Geocoding - The process of translating the physical address into a geographical location, typically involving latitude and longitude, failed to match to any existing location.
- Invalid State or Invalid Postal Code - The formatting of the State of Postal Code does not fit the expected guidelines for successful delivery.
- Undeliverable Address - Any mail that is returned by USPS as undeliverable because the address on the letter or package doesn't match any USPS records
How Do I Fix This?
To fix any of these addresses, select the edit box on the right hand side, and correct the address OR select ignore to remove this contact from this page in Data Health OR delete this address.
Phone Numbers
Review Reasons
- Improperly Formatted Phone Number- Virtuous validates phone numbers using US phone number formatting. There may be times when you have a valid phone number that is flagged, for example, a foreign phone number. The best practice, after verifying the details and formatting are correct, is to "Ignore".
- Duplicate Phone Number - This phone number was found on another contact record in Virtuous.
How Do I Fix This?
To fix any of these phone numbers, select the edit box on the right hand side, and correct the number OR select ignore to remove this contact from this page in Data Health OR delete this contact method.
Email Addresses
Something to note is that Bad Emails Addresses ONLY come from legacy imports. The Gift and Contact Import Tool has a number of safeguards in place to ensure only valid email addresses are entered into your database.
Review Reasons
- Assumed as Primary - Virtuous needs a primary email address. If data is imported, and nothing is flagged as the primary, Virtuous will assume the first email is the primary. This is flagged only for admin to be aware that Virtuous has assumed this. If this is incorrect or this is not the correct primary email address, you will need to edit this on the contact record.
- Undeliverable Email - This email address has been flagged as "undeliverable" for any number of reasons on the recipients end. This could possibly be due to a full inbox, email server outages, and many other factors.
How Do I Fix This?
To address any of these emails, select the edit box on the right hand side, and confirm this email is primary OR select ignore to remove this contact from this page in Data Health OR delete this email address.
While it may take some time and knowledge of your donors to work through all of these results, using the Data Health tool to clean up your data will give you more accurate reporting and more targeted communication, which is the first step in being a responsive organization!