Meet Insights Platform Data Integrity

Learning Objectives 

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain how Salesforce.org Insights Platform Data Integrity keeps your contact data up to date and accurate.
  
• Describe how to configure Data Integrity to regularly check your data for duplicate contacts, bad addresses, invalid emails and phone numbers, and deceased stakeholders.
  

Clean Your Data for Better Fundraising

Salesforce helps nonprofits like yours build relationships with the people who move your mission forward—but if your data isn’t clean and up to date, you aren’t able to reach your stakeholders.

Salesforce.org Insights Platform Data Integrity (which we’ll refer to in this badge as Data Integrity) helps keep your contact data accurate, complete, and reliable. It provides record deduplication, email and phone number validation, mailing address standardization, automatic address updates for donors who change addresses, and more.

These features help all your fundraising activities, from online campaigns to SMS messages to direct mail. You can be confident that your budget isn’t wasted on old addresses, invalid emails, or duplicate mailings. Plus, clean data helps you build donor trust and long-lasting relationships by ensuring your messages are timely and sent to the right supporters.

In this module, we’ll explore Data Integrity and how it works.

Make the Most of Data Integrity Features

Data Integrity provides a bunch of helpful tools to keep your data clean. It can:

• Standardize mailing addresses automatically to ensure they match the same standard postal format.
  
• Update donor mailing addresses automatically using National Change of Address (NCOA) data to reflect moves—no more wasted postage on mailings sent to the wrong address. (You must purchase a separate NCOA provider license to use this feature. Check out the details in Resources.)
  
• Flag invalid email addresses and phone numbers on contact records so you can either fix the data or remove contacts from email and phone lists.
  
• Check if a contact is deceased and record their date of death.
  
• Identify duplicate records in bulk to combine them and help you plan digital communications and direct mailing.
  

Language localization and the availability of address, phone, email, and deceased check features differ by country. Talk with your Salesforce Account Executive to see what’s available in your region.

Data Integrity is available as a premium product with an annual subscription fee, so talk to your Salesforce Account Executive to get access. Installing Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) in your Salesforce org is also required in order to use Data Integrity. Data Integrity is not compatible with the Nonprofit Cloud integrated solution.

Set Up Data Integrity to Update Your Records 

Once your admin installs Data Integrity in your Salesforce org, access it through the App Launcher () by finding and selecting Data Integrity.

You begin on the Get Started page, which can also serve as your Data Integrity homepage.

From there, you can schedule a couple of key functions: NCOA updates to ensure donor addresses are accurate, address standardization jobs to keep records in the proper format, and contact standardization jobs to validate emails and phone numbers and check if a contact is deceased. 

You can run each of these jobs on-demand or schedule them to run automatically every 30, 60, or 90 days. Need to run a job more frequently? You can set up as many scheduled jobs as you want. For example, you can schedule jobs to run every 30 days on the first and the fifteenth day of each month. For each job, you can target all contacts, contacts in a specific campaign, or only contacts’ default addresses.

Once you set up the scheduled jobs, you can review and edit them at any time. 

Plus, after an Address Standardization or NCOA update job runs, you can check out what changed by viewing and downloading a file of the results.

To manage deduplication, your admin starts by enabling or creating new matching rules to determine what combination of criteria indicates a match: the same first name, last name, email, or something else. A few standard matching rules come with Data Integrity and NPSP, so use those as your starting points.

Once your admin establishes your matching rules, they can set up duplicate rules so Salesforce knows what to do when it finds a duplicate. You can prevent a user from saving a potential duplicate or provide a warning that they may be creating a duplicate, just like in NPSP. 

When you run a duplicate job in the Data Integrity app, you can review potential duplicates in the Contact Merge tab and bring the information together into one record.

Address and contact standardization, NCOA updates, and duplicate checks might sound like they take a lot of upfront work, but it shouldn’t take your Salesforce Admin too much effort to get them up and running. After that, Data Integrity can continually help keep your data accurate, complete, and reliable.

Resources 

• Salesforce Help: Data Integrity Documentation
  
• Salesforce Help: Prepare Your Data For Success
  
• Salesforce Help: Set up National Change of Address Provider