Hi all,
We're in the process of working with Experian to do our first NCOA in many years. For our first pass at this process, we've opted to NCOA as many records as possible in 4 rounds. We have roughly 3,000,000 records in our database and I'm curious if any of you have insight/experience/advice about the following things:
1. How many years back should we consider casting the net for lapsed ticket buyers? Is there a standard number of years that acts as a reasonable cut off point?
2. As a follow up, what if we exclude certain ticket buyers based on our cutoff who engage with the museum post- NCOA, and don't have an updated address? How common is this and any recommendations for dealing with that?
3. Any further recommendations about how to segment records for an NCOA of this scope?
Thank you!
Kristin
Kristin Nyquist said:We have roughly 3,000,000 records in our database
That's a lot!
Kristin Nyquist said:1. How many years back should we consider casting the net for lapsed ticket buyers? Is there a standard number of years that acts as a reasonable cut off point?
That's a good thought, especially for a database that large. I don't think there is a standard, you might want to try to figure out a number that makes sense for your organization, perhaps by looking at the longest gap in engagement for your customers (in some nice round number like years) and then see what the curve is for that engagement gap. If you have small but significant count who had, say, a six year gap then you might want to go back at least that far.
We have about 800k, and I've never restricted the list based on engagement. I've been looking at that a bit, when we came on in 2004 I think we wound up importing decades of prior data, so we have a lot of customers who probably haven't engaged with us in this century, or even at a time when a computer would have been involved.
What I do limit is Address Type: Generally only "Home Address" or variants.
Kristin Nyquist said:2. As a follow up, what if we exclude certain ticket buyers based on our cutoff who engage with the museum post- NCOA, and don't have an updated address? How common is this and any recommendations for dealing with that?
I'd think about how that engagement might look. In theory if they buy or donate online they will at least see their address there, although they might skip over it without looking if buying an ETicket (almost all of our business now). Likewise, if a cashier is taking their order, would they ask to confirm their address?
Kristin Nyquist said:3. Any further recommendations about how to segment records for an NCOA of this scope?
I dislike the way the Tessitura handles the data returned from an NCOA update. It's been a long time, but if memory serves:
I don't like either. As a University, we're often interested in being able to see how customers evolve with us based on their past residences. Also, this can distort reporting: "Gosh we had a bunch of people on the East Coast buying tickets to these student-oriented events in 2010!". No, they were students in Berkeley at the time, and have since moved back to their original states. With deletes, we lose the original Address Type.
What I have built (not currently working for a couple of reasons, but soon! Maybe!) is a system that creates a new address on a Move action, which is then flagged as primary. Then the old address is inactivated and marked with a Contact Point Purpose that declares it either an NCOA Move or NCOA Delete.
I have a similar SQL system (that is working as of 15.2) that creates a new address, marks it as primary and then changes the former address to an "NCOA Old Address" type and marks it as inactive. I also dislike overwriting existing data for the reasons you state.
Agree with everything else Gawain Lavers and Phillip Parks say about segmenting and so forth.