SNOW & ASSOCIATES

Tip of the Month for Institutional Mailers

This page appears courtesy of Snow & Associates, an international research organization dedicated to helping educational, fraternal and professional institutions maintain better information on their alumni/ae, communicate more effectively with them, and relocate those who are lost. Click HERE to visit our home page.

Benefits of Tracking Social Security Numbers

If your institution has social security numbers (SSNs) on file for alumni, it will be easier to maintain better information about them, or relocate those who become lost.

SSNs are useful as a unique identifier, which allows you to distinguish between one John Smith and another. The larger your database, the greater the likelihood of tracking several people with the same name. This is especially true for alumni with common names.

Probably your institution already maintains unique ID numbers for alumni. Of course, these are useful in maintaining your records internally. However, ID numbers are usually not very helpful when comparing your records against those maintained by other institutions. But a SSN will remain the same in any database. For this reason, most educational, fraternal and professional institutions are now attempting to compile SSNs for as many alumni as possible.

The simplest method for gathering SSNs is to request them from current students. However, this will not increase the number of alumni with SSNs on file. Some service providers offer methods for finding SSNs of alumni. While relatively expensive, these services are usually helpful. Snow & Associates will refer you to companies that provide these services, upon request.

Another benefit of tracking SSNs is the possibility of relocating lost alumni, by cross-referencing your records against databases maintained by credit reporting agencies, other schools, or government agencies.

In a recent test run for two colleges and four greek letter institutions, Snow & Associates was able to relocate over 54% of lost alumni who had SSNs on file, as opposed to 25% to 35% of those who did not. In addition, the cost of relocating lost alumni with SSNs on file was generally a third less than using other methods.

However, it should be noted that the incidence of mail returns from SSN searches was also higher: 9.7% versus the normal 6.4%.

Most (not all) providers of SSN searches return data in UPPER CASE FORMAT ONLY. While it is possible to convert most of these data back to caps/lower case format automatically, using search-and-replace algorithms, some manual editing is usually necessary following a SSN search. Snow & Associates will provide keywords for these algorithms free of charge, upon request.

As with most large-scale data processing, the per-unit cost of running SSN searchs drops, as the number of records researched increases. S&A has been successful in combining records from several institutions into a single search, in order to achieve these economies of scale. After the search is completed, the data are segmented and returned to each institution for updating, at a cost lower than each institution would pay individually.

While SSN searches are not a substitute for standard methods of tracking alumni, or relocating those who are lost, they are an additional weapon in our arsenal of methods for improving the accuracy of databases. In summary, we offer the following recommendations:

• SSNs are useful in distinguishing one alumnus from another, especially for those who have common names.

• SSNs are helpful in comparing your records with those maintained by other institutions.

• Lost alumni with SSNs on file can be relocated more often, and more cheaply, than those without; however, the quality of the data returned is not as good as data from S&A's other research methods.

• S&A can combine records from several institutions in a single SSN search, in order to lower the cost of research.

• SSN searches are not a substitute for other methods, but are a worthwhile addition to our efforts to maintain better information on alumni, and relocate those who are lost.

• Click HERE to request SSN info from S&A.

Tips from Previous Months

Click HERE to read a brief discussion of the 'National Change of Address' service, offered by the U.S. Postal Service. (April-May '97)

Click HERE to see the results of an informal survey about the accuracy of databases maintained by the int'l headquarters offices of greek letter organizations. (March-April '97)

All text and images © 1995-97 by Snow & Associates.
Snowflake image by SS Designs.

Last updated: 1 June 1997
URL: http: // www . alum . org / ssn . htm