Regions

Annie Thornton

I'm looking to connect with and discuss how others use 'regions' in the Raiser's Edge.



Thanks so much!

Annie Thornton

Advancement Services

Saint Leo University



 

Gina Gerhard

Annie - We have a regional structure within our organization, with corresponding regional boards and committees. We also code constituents with regional attributes, we code our funds by regions, etc.



Do you have specific areas where you need some guidance or input around how the data is structured to handle this regional structure?

Alan French

If you mean the Region field on the address screen, currently we use it for UK regions only (e.g. North, South East, Greater London) but we have recently been talking about using this field for foreign addresses instead. Our County table is currently full of Chinese provinces etc. that we'd like to move elsewhere and Region seems like the best candidate, as we seldom if ever use the UK region data for anything.



I don't seem to be able to add Region to the address block though, so I have some concerns about whether this would cause a problem with mailings.

Amy Matthews

I've seen organizations use that field in a couple of different ways, usually to make segmenting their mailings easier:



-Neighborhoods

-Affiliate areas of service

-School districts

-Electoral districts

Gina Gerhard

Just a few additional thoughts on this ---



If the assignment of your Region code is based on an address, then it would make sense to use the Region field on the address. 

• But what about multiple addresses for the constituent?  
• For us, we want to categorize the constituent into a region that is not necessarily tied to an address. So we use an attribute to capture the Region information, and not the field on the address.

Annie Thornton

Address screen Region field is what I am referring to - when and how is the region added; how is it maintained; can there be multiple regions one one record.  I'm thinking it could replace the 'mapping' feature as all po box addresses are automatically excluded. 

~Annie



Alan French:

If you mean the Region field on the address screen, currently we use it for UK regions only (e.g. North, South East, Greater London) but we have recently been talking about using this field for foreign addresses instead. Our County table is currently full of Chinese provinces etc. that we'd like to move elsewhere and Region seems like the best candidate, as we seldom if ever use the UK region data for anything.



I don't seem to be able to add Region to the address block though, so I have some concerns about whether this would cause a problem with mailings.

 

Annie Thornton

Gina,  It does make sense to use the field, that is what I was thinking - and you bring up more good questions about multiples, etc.  I'm not grasping how it all works together..

~Annie



Gina Gerhard:

Just a few additional thoughts on this ---



If the assignment of your Region code is based on an address, then it would make sense to use the Region field on the address. 

• But what about multiple addresses for the constituent?  
• For us, we want to categorize the constituent into a region that is not necessarily tied to an address. So we use an attribute to capture the Region information, and not the field on the address.