The advice on keeping your database clean hasn't changed in years.
Audit. Deduplicate. Standardize. Enrich. Repeat.
Nobody argues with the advice. What gets skipped is an honest accounting of what it costs.
A recent survey of marketers found nearly 70% spend at least an hour every time they clean their CRM. Almost a third spend more than four. Most do this weekly or monthly. Indefinitely.
Now put a title to those hours. For associations, it's Membership Manager. Or Director of Member Relations. Or the Program Manager who should be building the member benefit that's been sitting on a whiteboard since spring.
Here's the part that makes it worse. The list starts decaying again the moment the cleanup ends.
Contact data decays roughly 22.5% a year (HubSpot). For a database of 5,000, that's 1,125 people gone. Potential members, donors, sponsors, volunteers, the exact contacts you'd need for whatever's next.
Nobody decided that. It happened while everyone was busy doing their actual job.
Which raises the real question. Who owns this?
Most associations don't have an answer. It could be membership, or IT, or the ED, but there's no Coordinator of Data Enrichment. Which means by default it's everyone's job. And if it's everyone's job, it's no one's.
MemberVerify owns the part of this nobody wants. Keeping the contact data itself correct. Permanently.
Send us 100 contacts. We'll show you what's already rotted.