How would you feel if your contribution statement was emailed to a friend instead of to you? It might not be a huge deal because of the relationship you have with your friend. But if you were the financial administrator of the church, you would hate the mess and clean it up.It doesn't happen a lot, but it can happen. The problem is that the email the church has on your record is your friend's, not yours. There are several ways this might have happened. The most common one is when your friend signed you up for an event and used his/her email for you instead of your real one.
The answer isn't to stop emailing statements because you will have the same problem with mailing addresses. The answer is to keep your data clean.
Figuring out how to help you keep your data clean is a passion for our development team. There are scores of internal checks that happen when people check-in, enter contributions, and fill out registration forms. Most of these are invisible. But even with all of these, wrong emails happen.
Introducing the Automated Email Cleanup Report
In our quest to help you keep your data clean, the team recently released an automated Email Cleanup Report. If you're a client you may have seen it the last couple of Thursdays.
The subject line is: Please review this list to make sure Churchteams giving statements go to the right people. The report itself looks like this:
There is at least one donation associated with the email address. The list of people share that email address but are in different households. It could be that member data needs merged into one record. But, often the email address needs to be removed from the record of the person who doesn't own the email address.
We ask you to REVIEW and REMOVE the email address from the wrong person. Even better would be to replace it with the correct email address. You will need to login to Churchteams to do this.
We are running and sending you this report once a week through the end of the year as long as we see a potential problem. This will give you the time and opportunity to make sure all your contribution statements go to the right people in January. We plan to send you this report monthly beginning in January, 2024.
When you get this emailed report, take just a few minutes to cleanup your email addresses. That will keep it from showing up again. It will also give you a new level of confidence in the ability of your database to communicate the right things to the right people.
This is a big deal.
