Dashboard

A Dashboard Spy reader wrote me to ask what the abbreviation UAA stood for. It seems that she is a designer who just joined a marketing metrics dashboard project team and was reviewing some wireframes that a business analyst created. On the top of a couple of columns of numbers were the letters “UAA” and the phrase “UAA Percentage”. She didn’t want to appear dumb in front of the BA and so decided to ask me instead.Of course, this triggered a “there’s no such thing as a dumb question” lecture from me. A business analyst would be happy to explain business content to a visual designer. Also, there may be a glossary of terms among the project documentation where you could find something like “UAA”.Anyway, UAA is an abbreviation for the term “Undeliverable-As-Addressed” and is a metric of high concern to direct marketers. Mail that has an invalid, incomplete or illegible address is considered UAA. It’s a huge problem that generates excess costs to marketers. As just one example of the magnitude of the problem, the U.S. Postal Service handled in 2004 over 9.7 billion pieces of undeliverable-as-addressed mail at a cost of $1.85 billion. Remember, this is mail that is already paid for and can’t be delivered because of addressing errors.This problem is not restricted to direct marketers. The blog for the Association for Postal Commerce (yes, there is such a thing!) tells this story (via intellisent.com/postalaffairsblog):

The  Associated Press has reported that “The IRS on Thursday announced its own little economic bailout plan, worth about $266 million, for taxpayers who didn’t get their economic stimulus checks or regular income tax refunds the first time around because they couldn’t be found. The tax agency said it couldn’t deliver about 279,000 rebate checks worth about $163 million coming from the economic stimulus package that Congress enacted last February. It said the U.S. Postal Service returned about 104,000 regular refund checks totaling about $103 million because of address errors”.

Intellisent adds this comment:

Now that puts a really personal price tag on UAA mail! That bears repeating — “the U.S. Postal Service returned about 104,000 regular refund checks totaling about $103 million because of address errors.” Much has been communicated regarding the cost of UAA mail to the Postal Service, and to mailers - this is a great example of the cost of UAA mail to mail recipients. What other critical mail items are recipients missing, completely unaware? Food for thought, this makes UAA efforts even more important for both mailers and mail recipients.

Now you understand why the investment in systems that aide in UAA efforts such as address change services, zip code validation and other address updating systems.

In terms of UAA as a marketing dashboard metric, we look at a post by Michael Overturf titled Communication Intelligence for Production Management.Let’s first take a look at the direct marketing dashboard that he discusses:

Here’s the commentary on the dashboard:

Tags: Direct Marketing Metrics Dashboard, UAA dashboard, Undeliverable as Addressed Metric

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Last Modified: Monday, November 10th, 2008 @ 09:53

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 9:53 am and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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