AFD Software – trusted experts in name, address, bank, email and phone data validation solutions recently sponsored My Home Move’s Head of Legal Practice Rob Gurney to cycle the length of the country!

Rob Gurney cycled 1,000 miles across 12 days, having set off from Land’s End in Cornwall (03 September). The challenge saw Rob cycle through Wales and the West Country, past Liverpool and Manchester then through the Lake District. When he reached Scotland, Rob then continued through Edinburgh and Inverness, before concluding his journey at John O’Groats on 14 September.

Prior to embarking on the challenge, Rob stated: “The charities we help through the MHM Trust do such amazing work, supporting some of their country’s most vulnerable children and adults, all affected by issues of homelessness. Being able to take on these challenges is easy when compared to the difficulties faced by the children we support in India, and the service users in Manchester, Northampton and Leicester, who have often lost everything and are battling to rebuild their lives.”

“I’d like to say a massive thank you to all who have sponsored me; including Isis Conveyancing Insurance Specialists, Purplebricks, Tepillo, People Value, Databarracks, Macleans Data, Talk Talk Business, Property Academy, Easy Property, LexisNexis and AFD Software. Due to their donations and sponsorship pledges we are on track to raise £10,000, over a third of our annual fundraising target.”

More information on My Home Move and its Charitable Trust activities can be found at www.myhomemove.com

AFD Software allows staff to nominate charities and have a donation made on their behalf. This year over £750,000 was distributed to over 50 charities which touch the hearts of our staff by the work they do. They include charities involved in tackling health issues, debt, slavery, child education, faith, disaster relief, and many others. You can read more about the rich variety of each charity nominated by staff at www.afd.co.uk/charity

The Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) has an important role in English football. It protects, improves and negotiates the conditions, rights and status of thousands of professional players – and has done so for over a century. Today, it is the longest-established professional sports union in the world, enabling its members to thrive.

In your customer, prospect, supporter or member data is hidden valuable insight and understanding waiting to be discovered. Imagine being able to better understand the patterns of success in your organisation and use this knowledge to increase the effectiveness of your marketing, communications and planning. With Censation® you can.

Censation is a Geodemographic classification system designed to release this insight by revealing relative affluence, life stage and lifestyle at postcode level. It does this through a simple but highly effective system which assigns one of 52 codes to each UK postcode.

How much is a license?
To license such a system would normally cost around £4,000 per year – but every End User of an AFD Software name or address management solution receives this FREE OF CHARGE.

How Censation is built
Leading UK statistics and demographics analysts DataTalk have built this bespoke system in partnership with AFD Software and ensure it is kept up-to-date. Inputs include over 600 variables from the national census and other reputable sources about where people live, how affluent they are likely to be, what ‘life stage’ they are in, data about housing, employment and education. All this data is analysed together with residential and commercial and an ongoing extensive program of face to face interviews with people from every part of the UK. Censation is in thousands of organisations from almost every UK organisational sector including commerce, education, finance, charity and government.

Raise your probability of success
Our guess is that your organisation would like to gain new insights that help focus activity and resources in the right place, toward the right people at the right time. How can your mailing be better targeted for response? Where will you open your next outlet? How can you increase the probability of success and reduce the possibility of failure? Could the shape and style of communication be more appropriate? These are real questions for almost every organisation – Censation helps you find answers.

Find out more

Have you implemented email address checking from AFD Software?

A simple mistake in typing an email address makes it impossible for an email to reach the right recipient. For a business or service-based organisation this can be costly to both revenue and reputation. An enquiry from a prospective customer appears not to have been answered or an order goes unfulfilled.

With nearly 50,000 customers across 107 branches, Safestore is the largest UK self-storage group.

“Some people ask if we can store their pets. Of course we can’t for lots of obvious reasons – but we do store teddies, drones and mannequins!” explained Tiffiny Franklin, Digital Outreach Executive at Safestore. Tiffiny continued “We do get interesting customers. Some move house and plan to store furniture with us ‘temporarily’. Then ten years later it’s still here. We don’t know people’s exact reasons for storing over long periods of time; maybe it’s because they feel guilty about getting rid of inherited or large items, or they hold onto things in the hope that the value may increase”

Safety in Abundance
A key customer concern when choosing a store for things they value is security. The Safestore buildings have CCTV in every corridor and intrusion and sensor alarms that automatically despatch security vehicles. “Each customer has their own padlock to which only they have the key and padlocks are never re-used” added Tiffiny.

For security, legal and financial reasons Safestore requires customers to provide a full, accurate postal address. This is not as easy as it seems. Head of IT, Phil Fryer explained: “Domestic customers are often in transition when they arrive at a Safestore. Those about to move into a new home or rented accommodation don’t necessarily know their new postcode. We need to quickly search and find the precise address out of the 30 million addresses in the UK.”

Always Improving
Safestore has a bespoke system designed around its specific needs and processes. This is installed on 200 computers across the UK. Until recently a locally installed version of AFD Postcode Plus was distributed and updated with software upgrades, using drive imaging and group policy updates.Safestore is always looking to make things more efficient and wanted to move as much of the client software system as possible away from mass electronic distribution. The biggest files were the monthly address data update files. Phil started to investigate a better, more efficient solution and realised that AFD Software offered multiple platform and deployment options: “We decided to have each desktop computer carry out postcode lookups and address searches by calling the AFD Postcode Plus Evolution hosted service. By using the AFD Software hosted services we have cut internal IT costs.

“We didn’t even need an integration as we used the AFD Robot which automatically detects a Postcode entered onto our system and returns the exact address or a pick list of options. We no longer need to distribute or update or manage address validation services as AFD do it for us so reliably.”

Saving Time and Money. Improving Cash Flow and Compliance.
Invoices, statements and changes to terms and conditions for all 107 Safestore branches are consolidated, printed and mailed by an outsourced fulfilment company. Phil continued: “We need to minimise the possibility of returned invoices. Each one returned carries an increased risk of non-payment and can result in significant internal costs to research and correct an address. We also face financial penalties on data inaccuracy from our mailing house. AFD Postcode Plus is saving us time and money and improving cash flow and compliance – through excellence in address capture.”

Passion, Energy, Loyalty
When we talk to Safestore we can feel the energy that comes from being passionate about what you do. Passion breeds new customers and keeps them. Did you know that 75 percent of AFD customers have been with AFD Software for over 5 years? Safestore is one of them.

Did you know?
Each Safestore branch supports a charity by offering a free storage unit. This equates to hundreds of thousands of pounds in value for over 100 deserving charities around the UK. One of these is the Twins and Multiple Births Association (Tamba) who store special support packs for new parents who have had twins, triplets or more!

Are You an Existing AFD Customer? Want to Upgrade?
If, like Safestore, you are updating your internal systems or applications, now may be a good time to upgrade and enjoy the benefits of the latest version of your AFD Solution. Our experts can advise and guide you.

Not yet an AFD Customer?
Join hundreds of customers who switch to AFD Software to enjoy automated data updates, multiplatform support and a wide choice of installed and hosted address validation options from the exclusive distributor of the source PAF® data from Royal Mail’s mainframe systems.

Find out more about SafeStore

At the end of 2016 over £750,000 was distributed to over 50 charities which touch the hearts of our staff by the work they do. They include charities involved in tackling health issues, debt, slavery, child education, faith, disaster relief, and many others.

What will drive your organisation to new levels of excellence in data stewardship and accuracy? In our search for extra insight to help you achieve more, we met with Skipton Building Society. Why? We reckoned we ought to be able to learn from an organisation driven to excellence not only by regulation and duty of care but also by its culture. We were not disappointed!

The Skipton Group HQ is set in the Yorkshire Dales market town of Skipton. They use AFD name and address management solutions across the Society. We sat with Bob Fielding (Strategic Buyer) and Phill Hirst (IT Applications Architect) to get two different, but complementary views.

Protect, Protect, and Protect

Bob set the context: “We’ve got 858,000 members and we serve them through 2,150 colleagues based at our HQ and a network of over 95 UK retail branches. From a purchasing perspective, all projects must have a business case that includes an imperative based on regulation or a customer benefit.”

Phill added: “We don’t have shareholders, we are a mutual: our members each have a vote and our job is to care for them. To remind us, each department is prefixed by the word ‘Customer’. Customer Journey, Customer Completion, Customer Complaints. We manage £18.9 Billion of assets; it’s our members’ money so we have three key considerations: ‘Protect, Protect, and Protect’! IT is foundational to achieving both the protection of regulatory compliance and enabling customer-focussed processes.”

Bob continued: “We applied these criteria to establish the requirement and specification for name and address validation.

For example, we have a requirement to protect the democratic process within the society – ensuring each member has just one vote – no more, no less. We require a single view of each customer’s interactions and business with us. We also wanted to comply with financial regulations and avoid financial penalties. We require that risk of fraud be minimised. Address data accuracy and prevention of duplicate records is key to meeting each of these requirements.”

Phill went on: “Mortgage applications illustrate the necessity for name and address accuracy. We need the current address for each applicant, the property to be purchased and the property the vendor is moving to, the solicitor, surveyor, and other professionals. A mortgage application can include over five addresses – all need to be right to process an application successfully.”

Best Value for Money

“AFD solutions provide rapid, accurate contact data entry across the Skipton systems and this then forms the basis for our primary matching routines which are based on customer addresses. We know that new homes are always being built (and some demolished!) and people are always moving – and with automatic data updates from AFD we know it’s always fresh.”

Bob added: “We’ve worked with AFD Software Names & Numbers and Postcode Plus solutions to achieve these objectives since the turn of the century (!), however we recently revisited this important area to ensure we get the best we can for the Society and its members.

After this review we confidently decided to continue with AFD Software– their solutions are robust, reliable and bug-free – they always work. We are fully satisfied that AFD is delivering best value for money and a solution that is proven to deliver on our regulatory and customer needs.”

www.skipton.co.uk

Supporting People, Processes and Growth

What if there is potential in your data which if released would steer you to increased growth and success? What if a meeting with one of our specialists could help you uncover that potential?

That’s what happened to Unique Fundraising. They are experts in acquiring long-term monthly donors for UK charities through face to face contact. This contact is made by being active in carefully selected retail or event locations.

The quest is firstly to use IT to plan and manage locations (referred to as “pitches”), fundraisers and identify new prime sites. Secondly to help each fundraiser focus on relating to the supporter and to provide clarity and transparency to their clients.

Field Connectivity and Supporter Acquisition
Each fundraiser goes into the field equipped with an iPad installed with a specially developed “Unique App” which connects to a live central database. However the locations often have neither Wi-Fi or a 3G signal.

Unique Fundraising IT Manager, Tom Colmer said “We’d be really engaging well with a potential charity supporter – and then lose them because the lost connection meant we couldn’t sign them up. We can’t afford for that to happen. We needed the whole process to happen securely on the local iPad – including the installed address and bank data validation.”

“AFD Software were the only organisation that had a full range of name, address and bank validation solutions ready for mobile platforms – including iOS. Roll out took just two days.

Now we are saving thousands of pounds and opening new “pitch” opportunities in network ‘dead-spots’.” Tom continued: “The following week our data centre went down for 45 minutes. Prior to the roll-out of installed address and bank validation for our fundraisers out on the street, this would have lost our partners £3,600!”

Wealth in Data
Dominic Peel is the Data Analyst and Researcher at Unique Fundraising, he explained: “We had a database of about 20,000 venues where we had worked or could work – but most records just had the store and town name. The poor quality data prevented us from using the experience and value this data represented to support our growth plans with analysis. We wanted it complete and accurate with a geographic location for each site.

We also wanted to understand the demographics of supporters we acquired in relation to the sites and the surrounding area. This would help us know where and when fundraisers would be best deployed and what additional sites would be most likely to deliver the best outcomes – and to grow.

Extracting the Wealth
In just two weeks we had ‘rescued’ the data, protected the substantial investment it represented and put ourselves in a position to analyse and predict pitch performance. We now have 23,000 accurate, geocoded locations. We are in the process of controlling future data entry using Postcode Plus. We saved an estimated £40,000 and 4,000 man hours of manual intervention with AFD Refiner and were amazed that Refiner could provide complete accurate addresses from such scant data.”

Demographic Analysis
IT Manager Tom Colmer: “In addition to this we plan to use the Censation Geodemographic Classification system to analyse the backgrounds of over 100,000 supporters in relation to the locations where they signed up. This new knowledge helps us hone our efforts for our partners and repeat patterns of success.”

Control and Transparency
Tom continues “We need to pay for the pitch location by the hour – so with the data appended using AFD Refiner we can check and know that each fundraiser is in the right place at the right time and the pitch is not vacant! This transparency fulfils resource management requirements and ensures our staff are only working in locations where we have official permission.”

Each stake-holder wins
Tom goes onto say: “We, our Partners, and our fundraisers love the results of switching to AFD Software. In a sensitive and competitive environment we are operating at a higher level and able to deliver measurably more supporters, better process efficiency and better resource allocation.

AFD Software’s implementation has allowed Unique to further strengthen its proposition to charity partners and released the time we need to develop those relationships and build the business.”

Consultancy
Tom concluded: “We started talking with AFD Software because of field connectivity issues, and our AFD consultant Jonathan carefully worked through our business model with us. Doing this really added value to our business and the result is a much deeper and wider solution. AFD were also flexible in tailoring their solutions to our specific needs. The benefits are both tactical and strategic, immediate and long-term.”

www.uniquefundraising.org

A fundamental business improvement

Preston’s College has positioned itself in the heart of its community in the North of England. With thousands of students aged 14-18, studying vocational, A-Level, and post-school courses, Preston’s College also prides itself on its extensive adult education services, apprenticeship provision and working with employers to employ students of all ages.

Further education is a vital step for school leavers. Whether laying a solid foundation to enter the workplace or achieving the necessary results to gain a place at University, Preston’s College is motivated by its students’ future possibilities.

We sat down with Rick Giagnacovo, Information Systems Manager at Preston’s College, to discuss some of the challenges the college has faced around its students’ address data.

“Throughout the year, we enter a lot of learner details onto our systems. We use that information for engagement and reporting – it’s essential we get those details correct.

From the start of our process in looking for an alternative supplier to provide our address validation, AFD Software made it clear that that they are specialists in the higher education sector. Working with an organisation that understands the sector was a big draw.

Our previous address validation solution was seen as an overhead tied exclusively to two of our systems and could not be used elsewhere in the college where there was also a requirement for accurate addresses at the point of entry. A major limitation we found was only being able to validate addresses by a correct postcode. Since making the upgrade to AFD Software, users can now search by address fragments as well as by postcodes – very handy for our students who may not know their exact address details.”

Postcode Plus from AFD Software has allowed Preston’s College to deploy essential rapid, accurate address validation throughout the college.

An education in integration

At AFD Software, we are constantly seeking new ways to improve our services and functionality to directly benefit our end users, offering integrations with most systems. With our patented Robot technology and technical expertise, we can always find a way for our powerful Name, Address, and Bank validation solutions to work within your organisation.

Discussing AFD Software’s implementation at Preston’s College, Rick goes on to say: “It just worked, the installer was simple – two clicks and it was working! There was no impact on our users and no additional training was required.

Before the introduction of AFD Software, we would have to switch to a different screen to access the address lookup functionality. Now we can update student details all from one system – saving time and staff frustrations.

This is a fundamental business improvement that I could not recommend highly enough to other colleges and further education organisations.” Preston’s College made the upgrade to AFD Software and now reap the benefits.

AFD Software has been helping organisations in the education sector like Preston’s College for over 30 years, improving business processes and helping achieve goals. Today, thousands of organisations in multiple sectors directly benefit from AFD Software’s address management solutions in a variety of environments. How could your organisation benefit?