I speak and write a lot about data integrity reports. So I was pleased to see a post recently on ASAE's Collaborate from Shaun Holloway, Director of Information Technology, at the American Motorcyclist Association, outlining a list of what he called "data hygiene checks."

As a reminder, the purpose of a data integrity report is to find potentially erroneous data in your system, so you can clean up the data. Here are just a few examples of what Shaun is doing at AMA:

• Common misspellings like ".cmo" or ".ogr" in the email field
• Email addresses with no @ sign
• Accounts with a City but no State
• Automated job that checks VIN numbers members submit to AMA against the Federal VIN database. These are then autocorrected with vehicle make, model, year, etc.

Shaun listed nearly two dozen data points they are checking. He didn't list the frequency of these checks, but if they can be automated (like the fourth bullet point) then they could be checked as frequently as daily.

The overarching goal of these checks is to continuously weed the garden, which is the only way you can really keep your data clean over the long term.