For 35 years Northwest Database Services has been working with corporate and non-profit organizations, mailing houses, and small businesses; helping them collect, clean, and manage their data. We will identify data errors and then change, update, or remove data to correct them, find and mark duplicate records, and prepare it for use in the field. When we first started managing customers’ mailing lists, in 1986, most organizations did not have computers. We entered their data, managed, regularly updated their files and then output presorts for their mailings and reports for their review. As more organizations began to manage their own data, data disparity increased, data standards began to blur and data quality deteriorated. Increasingly, our project time was occupied with cleaning customers’ data so that we could feed accurate information into the applications that tracked customer activity or donors’ s giving habits. Data’s vulnerability has always been human error, inconsistencies, redundancies, spelling mistakes, typos, and incomplete information. Data cleansing, also referred to as data cleaning or data scrubbing, is the process of fixing incorrect, incomplete, duplicate or otherwise erroneous data in a data set. Data cleansing, data cleaning and data scrubbing are generally considered to be the same thing. In some cases, data scrubbing is viewed as an element of data cleansing that specifically involves removing duplicate, bad, unneeded, or old data from data sets. Good clean data ensures that you will spend the least money and get the largest returns possible. Whether your business uses data to predict and understand your customers, stay in touch with them through the mail, or contact them regarding unique offers, we can help your efforts by making the data you use more accurate, current, and consistent. If you are a non-profit organization mounting an appeal or depend on direct mail with its razor-thin profit margins (2%-4%), then data hygiene is essential. Any business model calculations are only as accurate as the data fed to them, so it is costly to overlook data cleansing’s importance to any data-driven project. Clean data improves execution and allows your company to discuss more consistently what matters to your prospects and customers on an individual level. We can help you accomplish this.