A couple months back I discussed the importance of data integrity reports. One of my past clients and a longtime reader, David Churchill at Grantmakers in Health, offered up this idea, which I think is fantastic and should be added to any association's list of data integrity reports.

As he explains: "I found that there’s a lot of email address mistakes made during our online registration process. It's not always easy to spot simple typos like .cmo (.com), .ogr (.org) so I created a query that is titled “questionable top level domains” that shows any record with likely typos (or .ru which is largely spam)."

One reason I love this query is that it's designed to capture "common" errors with the knowledge that it won't catch every error. And it has the added bonus of looking at addresses that are likely spam.

But what a great idea! If a customer mistypes their email address, other than checking bounced emails in the future, how will anyone know there is an error? By proactively checking for errors, David is weeding the garden, which is critical to long-term data management success.