Age Finder (Blackbaud's or Third Party)

We've used Agefinder services before. Main advice would be, use it as a guide, not a religion. In our services with reputable third parties, we compared the returned ages with the birthdates of alumni we already had on file, to get an estimate of its accuracy. We found that

• The donor's birthyear was usually correct (except in cases of confused identities such as Jr. & Sr.)
• The donor's birth month was only correct about half the time
• The donor's birth day was rarely correct

In other words, agefinder can be a great service to use for internal functions like prospecting a planned giving program or segmenting based on generational giving trends. But I would never, ever use it for outward-facing functions like sending birthday cards to donors.

Also a wise idea to track which birthdates are factual (donor-provided) and which are speculative (data appended). We only import the year into the donor's “birthdate” field, and added a “Data Append” attribute denoting date and type of info appended, so there would be no confusion over data source.

Last time we ran an append, we had a pretty good turnout, about 80-90% return on our valid address file. If you have a choice, opting for a birthdate append, rather than just an age number, improves accuracy and is usually the same price/workload. If you run an “age” append in June, half your donors may turn a year older by December.