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You can wait until the post office is notified of the passing and stops mailing to the deceased. Or you can wait until you receive a request from the family of the deceased to remove them from your mailing list. But the last thing a fundraiser or marketer wants to do is cause further pain on the family of a previous donor, or customer. Nothing is more embarrassing or insensitive - especially when paired with slogans such as "Donate now to save a life", or "Act now for a once in a lifetime opportunity!".
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What's the alternative to this, how can you avoid this terrible situation?
By being proactive with your mailing practices and using a deceased mailing suppression service which will either flag your mailing list with a deceased field in the data, or by removing the recipient completely from the list. These databases are updated on a monthly basis, and the process begins once a death is reported to the Social Security Administration. The processing may take a few months before all of the deceased suppression databases have been updated. While no service can guarantee 100% suppression - a vast majority of the deceased recipients will be caught by using such a service. Besides the benefit of avoiding an insensitive message to the family, depending on the size of your mail lists and how clean you have kept it, this may also save you money in printing and postage.Along with deceased mailing suppression, you may want to consider further cleansing of your mail list which includes DMA Suppression - this stops mailing to recipients who have signed up for the national DMA Do-Not-Mail list. You could also use a suppression suite which cleanses both DMA mail preference, deceased suppression, and also includes prison, trailer park, and nursing home suppression as well. While you may not wish to run your entire list against this kind of suppression, you may want to consider this for people you have never contacted before - such as an acquisition list, or a list you recently purchased.
Maintaining your data, and keeping it clean is a responsibility you should not take lightly. A mistake such as those described above can cause pain to a previous donor's family, and prevent future donations or purchases. Movad offers the services mentioned in this blog, and we welcome the opportunity to work with you. Whether or not you use our services, we highly recommend that you recognize the importance of this suppression and look into this now.
Do you have questions about this service, or do you have a similar story to share? Let us know in the comments below. You can also reach us through our contact us page, or call us at 215.638.2679. And please feel free to share this blog with your colleagues - the more who know that these services exist the better!
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