Data hygiene

Event data decays fast. People change jobs, companies rename and merge, emails die — a meaningful slice of any attendee list goes stale within a year. Hygiene is what stands between you and the compounding costs: bounced campaigns that damage your sender reputation, matchmaking built on job titles from two editions ago, sales teams calling companies that no longer exist, and reports leadership stops trusting. Good hygiene at an event business looks unglamorous and specific: standardized country and company-name formats enforced at entry, validation on email fields, a dedupe pass on every import, bounce and unsubscribe processing after every send, and a pre-edition refresh where high-value records get verified before matchmaking runs. Crucially, it starts at collection — dropdowns instead of free text, required formats, enrichment to fill gaps — because preventing bad data costs a fraction of cleaning it. There's a compliance angle too: GDPR expects accuracy and storage limits, so contacts silent for years should be re-permissioned or deleted, not hoarded. The common mistake is the annual heroic cleanup: one big scrub before the show, then eleven months of neglect that rebuild the mess. Assign ownership, put the routines on a calendar, and track two or three simple health metrics — bounce rate, duplicate rate, field completeness — so decay becomes visible before it becomes expensive.