In 2019, the UK celebrated the 60th anniversary of the postcode.
We use our Postcode practically every day for online purchasing, confirming our identities, checking traffic home, arranging trips for the next day, and so on. In fact, according to a recent Royal Mail survey, some people are more likely to remember their Postcode than their birthdays and significant anniversaries! But how well do you know the Postcode’s history?
During the 1850s, when mail volumes began to rise, it became evident that a complete addressing solution would be required. Initially, this meant merely dividing London into postal districts based on the points of the compass, each with its own head office. Many of these London postal districts, such as SE and NW, are still in operation today. The method was then expanded to other important towns and cities, but it wasn’t until 1959 that Ernest Maples (pictured below), the then Postmaster General, trialled a more comprehensive postal code – the form we know today – in Norwich.
Postcode Address File and Updates
The Postcode Address File (PAF) was produced in the early 1980s and contains all of the UK’s commercial and residential addresses. Data was captured electronically, however updating the file was done on paper, which was time-consuming.
PAF is now a fully digital, integrated system that can be updated in real-time. It receives over half a million updates every year, ensuring that it remains the UK’s most accurate and up-to-date addressing database, with over 31 million deliverable UK addresses spread across almost 1.8 million postcodes.
Jul. 07, 1959 – “The Postmaster General, Mr. Ernest Marples, this afternoon visited Norwich to inspect the sorting office where eight electronic sorting machines (Elsie) have been installed. He also announced that everyone in and around Norwich is to be given a postal code and asked to use it as the last line of their postal address. This will apply to residents, firms and business houses alike – in fact, everyone whose present address includes the words ‘’Norwich, Norfolk’’. He said the people of Norwich will be the first in the world to use postal codes in this way. The object is to open the way for the automatic sorting of letters. Photo shows Mr. Ernest Marples feeding letters into one of the electronic sorting machines at Norwich today. Each of the machines costs about £15,000 and sorts 3,000 letters an hour.”
Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) data can now be returned using AFD’s Address Lookup and Data Cleansing Solutions.
EPC’s provide an indication of how much it will cost to heat and light a property, and how much CO2 the property emits.
The better the rating on the EPC certificate, the lower the cost of running the property.
Find out more about EPC data and how to access it when validating an address or appending to existing databases here.
The AFD team recently sponsored the Student Records Officers’ Conference (SROC) which brought together staff working in the field of student records within HE Providers together to:
AFD’s HE specific solutions that help the sector are detailed below:
Address Lookup
Fast, accurate address validation helps ensure student address data is correct at the point of entry. Our solution is quick to install as confirmed by the University of Dundee: “Upgrading to AFD Software within our student record system took the best part of a couple of hours. It just worked straight away. We needed to do some work within our online forms as we were now offering an online postcode lookup. The solution works straight out the box, but we needed to spend some time reorganising the structure of the forms so the postcode question was asked first rather than last. The actual postcode popup screen just worked with some small configuration changes made once globally.”
Batch cleansing address data – HESA Returns
Even with data validation in place, student address data can still be entered incorrectly and can be received in bulk from UCAS.
As accurate address data is one of the requirements for the HESA return, AFDs Refiner tool helps universities by taking all their address records and cleansing them against the best possible sources.
Many of our customers would have staff spending huge amounts of time manually checking addresses before discovering we could help do this process in around an hour.
POLAR data – Widening participation
In addition to cleaning and reformatting addresses, Refiner can also append Education specific data sets including POLAR4.
If an HE provider wishes to charge above the basic tuition fee cap, they are required to have an “approved access and participation plan” for students from minority groups, areas of lower Higher Education participation, lower household income and/or lower socioeconomic status groups.
POLAR4 data shows how likely young people are to participate in higher education according to where they live, this allows Universities to target specific areas with marketing efforts in a bid to meet targets for widening participation and essential funding.
Other datasets include Index of Multiple Deprivation (governments official rank of Postcode from most deprived to least deprived) and Censation, AFD’s geodemographic classification system that shows the typical age, affluence, lifestyle, interests and professions at Postcode level.
Phone and Email
HESA confirms that each institution is required to collect graduates’ personal contact details to contact them 15 months after graduation for the “Graduate Outcomes” survey.
it is a requirement for the details to be “robust, accurate and comprehensive” and it is recommended that point of collection validation is in place for when details are entered and updated on the student record, and that alumni contact details are thoroughly cleansed prior to submission to HESA.
Email and telephone validation from AFD further help meet this requirement and achieve the target of “robust, accurate and comprehensive” contact data.
If your institute would benefit from AFD’s range of data validation and cleansing solutions contact one of our Data Quality Consultants on 01624 811711 or email postcode@afd.co.uk
We enjoyed exhibiting and presenting at the Tribal Empower conference this week. AFD Software is the preferred supplied of address, email and phone validation and cleansing to over 90 universities and 200 colleges.
AFD’s data cleansing engine, Refiner, specifically helps Universities with cleansing contact data received in bulk from UCAS and in preparation for HESA returns.
The University of Dundee has worked with AFD’s solutions to improve their student data processes, they provided feedback around how much time and frustration we helped them overcome;
“Following the implementation of AFD’s Refiner address cleansing process, for the first time since the introduction of Graduate Outcomes return we have managed to process the return and successfully submit with just a handful of errors compared to thousands each year that we have had to manually cleanse record by record. We managed to process, deliver and commit the return in less than 24 hours which is monumental and a real step forward for the optimisation of our Statutory Returns.”
Find out more at www.afd.co.uk/education
AFD Software is attending the Microsoft Cloud Community event “Scottish Summit 2022” to meet with other organisations that develop solutions for Dynamics 365 or use Dynamics 365 as their CRM system.
Come and visit the team on the 10th and 11th of June to discuss how address, email, phone and bank validation integrated within D365 could benefit your organisation at The Technology and Innovation Centre, Glasgow Strathclyde University.
More information about our D365 plugin can be found here
AFD Software and The Algorithm People have partnered to deliver AFD’s market-leading geocoding and address lookup technology within The Algorithm People’s award-winning “My Transport Planner” route optimisation service.
Colin Ferguson, CEO of The Algorithm People said: “Combining our optimisation algorithms with AFD’s advanced geocoding and postcode-lookup service, will generate even greater savings and efficiencies for our clients. We saw a combined 24% reduction in mileage and 17% overall saving in time in trials we carried out, due to the very high accuracy of the address information.”
Jonathan Stocks, Head of Sales & Marketing at AFD Software explains: “Partnering with The Algorithm People and integrating our respective technologies, opens a new market for us, and offers an enhanced value proposition with tangible benefits for our existing customers. Our Address Validation and Matching technology provides a greater level of location accuracy, which reduces time spent by the driver trying to find addresses and when used in conjunction with The Algorithm People’s optimisation algorithms, delivers a further reduction in mileage“.
If you are interested in finding out how AFD’s address and location validation and cleansing solutions are helping other organisations in the logistics sector, contact one of our address and location data experts today.
Channel preferences are unique to everyone. Physical mail, email, text, phone call, messaging apps and social media are all used by organisations to communicate with their customers.
Accurate data is key to organisations that want to maintain contact with their customers or supporters.
As of 2021, 96% of UK adults have a mobile phone they actively use and choose as a channel of communication, the requirement of accurately capturing and maintaining phone numbers has never been more important.
AFD’s phone validation solution helps ensure accurate data by confirming the number of digits and format are correct, then going a step further by confirming the number is live.
Phone verification gives organisations full confidence that they can communicate with their customers. To highlight the cost an incorrect phone number can have, we caught up with a long-term customer of AFD to get their feedback.
Paul Brownlow, Systems Development Manager at South & City College Birmingham states: “The college were concerned about the accuracy of student entered phone numbers and emails. When contacting students for course interviews, open days and other key information, we found multiple instances where the mobile phone numbers provided were wrong, either due to error or intentional misinformation.
Each student studying at the college between 16 and 18 years old effectively provides us with £5,000 per annum of vital funding, whilst students over 18 provide £2,000. Preventing one or two students from slipping through the net, because they would otherwise miss a key communication and fail to enrol, more than covers the cost of email and phone validation from AFD.”
Have you implemented email address checking from AFD Software? Human error is all too easy when keying in data. One wrong character in an email address will result in a failed delivery.
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
AFD Software make it easy for businesses to check email addresses wherever they are entered by staff or customers. There are three checks:
Some services check only syntax, some only domain and many do not check the local part. Email address validation from AFD Software checks all three: Syntax, Domain and the Local Part. It is not always possible to validate the full email address at each domain – however, whenever it is at all possible the AFD email validation service will do so.
Did you know? One third of the earth’s population use email and together send around 74 trillion emails each year – so we reckon an email address check is worth implementing!
Adding address validation to your website for customers or internal systems for staff use has multiple benefits:
Speed
How long does it take to type your address?
Using a keyboard it took 16 seconds to type:
18 Weatherhill Rise
Oakes
Huddersfield
HD32AF
The same address took 23 seconds on a mobile device.
Luckily, address lookup and address validation means the same address can be found by just entering the postcode and selecting the house number or typing the house number then the postcode.
Customers are used to a fast online checkout experience, adding between 16 and 23 seconds to this journey can cause potential sales to not complete.
Accuracy
Speed is one aspect, but accuracy is essential if you want your goods or services to reach the customer.
Time it takes to enter details will be dwarfed in customer annoyance if an order doesn’t reach them, has to be returned and resent!
Using address verification at the point of entry ensures only accurate addresses can be selected.
Formatting
Storing data in multiple formats can lead to a multitude of issues.
If a decision is taken to move systems data could be lost during exports and imports
Mail and parcel labels lead to customers asking “why does my address look like that?” when they receive their delivery.
By having controls in place to validate address data is accurate, also ensures address formatting is consistent.
GDPR approved
A key part of GDPR confirms “Personal data shall be: (d) accurate” Address data is personal data when it is entered along with a customer’s name. Postcode lookup and address lookup helps facilitate accuracy of persona data and meet the regulations.
Analysis
Organisations wanting to identify their “ideal customers” to upsell to or find prospective customers that match their characteristics will struggle if analysis is based on inaccurate or missing data.
The Postcode People at AFD Software have nearly 40 years’ experience helping thousands of organisations get address data accurate. A combination of; the best team with 450 years of combined experience, the best data sources utilising in house, Royal Mail PAF and Ordnance Survey (OS) Address Base within the best solutions make AFD the ideal choice as your partners in address and data quality.
To find out more and try out our address lookup solutions click here or contact one of the team today.
Next week, AFD Software are attending the UCISA conference in Manchester.
If you or a member of your team are attending, we look forward to seeing you at stand 96.
We will be hosting live demonstrations of our HE specific solutions that include;
Address, email and phone validation and cleansing of existing student contact data.
Further information about AFD’s education-specific solutions that over 90 Universities rely on can be seen here.
We serve thousands of organisations and a network of hundreds of partners across multiple industry sectors, enabling them to have full confidence in their contact data.