Addresses

Jackie Eutsler

What standards do you use for entering address?

JoAnn Strommen

Jackie,

By 'standards' I'm assuming you are referring to format standards. This is going to just depend on your orgs preferences/standards.  Are you in US?  Do you deal with a lot of international addresses?  Do you use AddressAccelerator? The US Post Office has their standards.  We use those as our primary guidelines ( ex: for Drive we enter Dr). We don't do it all in uppercase and have a couple other cases where we don't follow them.   If you utilize a mail house they will be using USPS standards.  Supposedly using postal standards helps get your mail delivered faster.



There have been several other threads on this - this link will take you to one of them

Re: Data Entry According to USPS standards

Nicole S

We use AddressAccelerator which will help get everything standardized.  We go with no abbreviations and apartment/suite on the second line.  Wehaven't had any issues with mailing on this.  Others go the post office approved format, which is also fine, our DD and CEO prefer the longer version because it looks nicer on a letter or invites.  When our larger mailings go out through a mailhouse, they use the PO format and the longer format appears on the letter.

Darren Ponce

Much Like Nicole mentioned. We also do not abbreviate addresses. When I was hired the CEO asked if I would help implement ful addresses and fix the old ones only if I was looking in their account. It pretty much always gets entered in a format similar to this now:



Jand and John Doe

Wexler Inc.

1123 W Lakemead Apt. 155

Mountain View, CA 94043

United States

 

Alan Berquist

I agree with all the above posts. The most important part is to have a style guide and stick to it. I came from an organization that like everything spelled out, but we abbreviated some things that made it tough to fit an street on one line with labels (like Boulevard as Blvd. and longer directional streets to be NW, NE, SW, and SE).



If you need International address help, a great resource is: http://www.columbia.edu/~kermit/postal.html

Susan Connors

We use PO standard, but not all uppercase, no punctuation, a space between Apt (unit, slip, ste, etc).  e.g.



123 1st Blvd Apt 301



Following this makes sending data to mailhouses easier and cheaper, and it's easier to search on address fields, if you know there are no stray periods or commas or other wrongly-formatted address parts that may not show a match when searching.  Initially, we were spelling everything out, but the mailhouses had to standardize anyway.  We sent out the addresses for standardization - it wasn't expensive.

Darcy Hoffman

We also follow PO standards, upper/lower case and spell out most everything unless the address line is too long.



What are everyone's thoughts about adding United States to all domestic postal adds? We just converted to RE and I would like to remove United States from all postal adds to alleviate data cleanup on all my exports that include mailing domestic, but some foreign postal. I am hesitatnt to do this because I don't know the ramifications of having the country blank. (i.e. Does AddressAccelerator need the country populated- I am hoping we will get AddressAccelerator soon!!!)



Thanks for your thoughts!

Nicole S

Not sure I understand.  Why don't you just exclude country from the export or merge if you aren't using it?  If the merge includes some foriegn addresses that need the country, you can easily use an if, then else.. to control that. My policy is that if you know the info fill it in.  Country is also linked to the address format, but I'm not sure that leaving it blank would affect that though.

Darcy Hoffman

Thanks. Unfortunately, most of the users on my campus for whom I provide data are not savvy enough w mail merges to include if/then to only print countries other than US.... but perhaps training/templates is an option!!!  ;-)



It's data cleanup either way as some domestic postal have US and others are blank.

Jen Claudy

I believe (and am fairly certain it's consistent) that RE does not export USA as the Country if your settings indicate that your database/org is in the USA.  I just exported a mailing list, including the Country field, and the resulting data is blank in that column except for our very few international addresses, where it's populated.  I used Address Processing in an Export.



Before you go changing massive amounts of data, I recommend that you run a few tests with however you will be using your data (Export, Mail, etc.) with the Country field.  Only change things if there is a solid reason to do so.  I can't imagine you don't have other data scrubbing projects that would be more worth your time.  Unless, of course, you do have a situation where this Country field is going to cause you headaches.