As a Habitat for Humanity affiliate you do a lot of mailings, including appeals, ground-breaking and dedication announcements, newsletters, and more. Mail that is returned due to bad addresses represents wasted time, money, and effort. In addition, you want to avoid potentially embarrassing situations such as mail sent to a donor who has died that might harm your relationship with the family.
You can have numerous bad addresses in your database for a variety of reasons: they may be duplicates, incomplete, non-standard, people may have moved, or the address may simply be wrong (e.g., the street or apartment building doesn’t have that number). However, there are services you can purchase to help you correct some of these problems:
- Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) – improves the accuracy of the address and ZIP Code through standardization. Mailings that are CASS Certified are eligible for certain bulk mail postage discounts. In order to become CASS Certified, the mailing list must be run through a software program approved by the United States Postal Service (USPS).
- Delivery Point Validation (DPV) – Confirms the existence of a specific address and the fact that it can be delivered to. DPV can validate that a mailing address down to the apartment or suite number does exist and is a valid destination for mail or package delivery.
- National Change Of Address (NCOA) – Provides change of address information submitted to USPS by people when they relocate or collected by USPS via other means.
When you get ready to do your mailings, you may send your mailing list to a mail house that can provide these services, but the corrections never get back into Keystone. That’s why we have created MTD KeyAddress, a new Keystone utility to end your address updating frustration. MoreThanData has negotiated with a service called MailListCleaner that provides all of the above services at a special rate only available to Keystone users.
In addition, we have worked with MailListCleaner to integrate KeyAddress with Keystone in order to reduce the labor you have to expend in doing address maintenance. Keystone combined with KeyAddress can manage the following:
- Identification and merging of duplicates
- Identification of incomplete addresses
- Purging of addresses that no longer have value while preserving important related data (such as donor and volunteer history)
- Preparation and review of addresses in a format ready to be sent to MailListCleaner
- Automated export of the data to the service
- Address standardization (CASS)
- Address verification (DPV)
- New addresses of people who have moved (NCOA)
- Identification of people who have moved with no forwarding address (NCOA)
- Automated importing of the address changes back into Keystone
Using KeyAddress requires you to establish an account with MailListCleaner. The special price of the service for Keystone/KeyAddress users is:
$1.00 per thousand records with a minimum of $30 for validating against an 18 month history
$1.50 per thousand records with a minimum of $50 for validating against a 0-48 month history
Typically, you will only need to validate a 48-month history the first time you use the service in order to ‘catch up’ older addresses in your database that haven’t been corrected in a long time, if at all. After that, validating against the last 18 months of changes should be sufficient if done annually. If you are planning a bulk mailing, check first with the United States Postal Service for any specific rules about address validation and correction for that mailing type before you send that mailing out.
Note: There is a minimum requirement of 100 records.
These prices are only available to Habitat for Humanity affiliates who are Keystone/KeyAddress users.
KeyAddress is integrated with Keystone and is available as a Keystone utility at no cost to affiliates with current Keystone subscriptions. Users will only pay service fees for address correction and validation (outlined above), and those fees will be paid directly to MailListCleaner.
We are excited about offering KeyAddress to you. We believe it will provide not only significant savings on postage but also access to potential new sources of revenue for your affiliate by ensuring that essential mailings reach the intended person, each of whom could be an important donor or volunteer.
You can download KeyAddress from our Product Downloads page.