Spell out Address or Abbreviate

Rachel Slager 2

If you have a policy for spelling out addresses, what is it and why did you choose it?



Our mail house abbreviates our addresses and removes punctuation at no extra charge, so when we do mass mailings we follow the preferred method of the USPS for bulk mailings.



We have numerous events where the invitations are printed in house and the person who manages these wants her staff to spell out all addresses.  They were doing this manually through find and replace in excel, then when I started I created an Crystal reports tool that does this automatically, but it's still kind of a pain.

Also there is a cost issue...

We have numerous duplicate addresses due to many constituents living at the same address, or duplicates.  For big mailings we have to look for dupes and then determine when we can merge these and address one mailing as "The Smith Family".  This is more difficult when each instance of the address is abbreviated with varying punctuation, or if it's spelled out fully.  So many make it through and we end up spending much much more on mailings than we'd like to.



There is clearly a need for us to have a standard, but then the question is what is more advantageous, spelled out or abbreviated?

Elaine Tucker

It looks like your issue is more duplicate addresses, than the actual formatting.  On your shared households are you sharing the address?  If you ARE sharing the address, then the formatting will all be the same regardless if you spell out or use abbreivations.

If you are not sharing your addresses, the maybe the route to go would be code secondary household members as "exclude from XYZ" mailing on their solicit or mail code.



Most of our constituents update their user profiles and addresses via netcommunity, and I realized along time ago, it was not worth any of my time to try and edit all the addresses that came in to follow abbreviated vs not abbreviated addresses.

 

Jen Claudy

We use the USPS abbreviations on everything.  This helps to prevent duplicates, because RE will find the dupes since the abbreviations are consistent, without having any data entry rules to remember/follow and audits to run.



As for your first question...my former boss always wanted "City, State Zip" on the letters, where the envelope (per USPS standards) is "City State  Zip" with no punctuation and two spaces between state and zip.  I run mailings by Exporting from RE to MS Access and I have code in Access that concatenates the City, State, Zip fields in two ways, one with punctuation for the letter and one with no punctuation for the envelope.  You could do something similar, where Access adjusts addresses back to the more formal, nonstandard format.  You could also intentially duplicate addresses with the nonstandard format and use a different set of Address Types.  Then when you get data back from your mailhouse, you will just need to update both addresses for those that move.



I would say that, unless your database is small enough that there aren't many address updates when you screen your database, but if you already have staff editing all of the addresses on a mailing list every time, it might not be any increase in the time spend on this, and possibly save a bit.



Either way, I hope you are Importing your NCOA data to RE when your mailhouse sends it back.  And screening your entire database regularly (every 3 months or more frequently).

Jenny Kleintop

Our policy is to spell out everything and use Title case rather than all caps as folks feel it's more personal and feels softer/friendly for the recipients, more of a formal invitation feel than a mass mail feel.

Nicole S

Same as Jenny here.  We like to spell out and use proper cap. I have not seen more returned mail or a lag in mail being recieved using this method over abbreviating and all caps. It looks less bulk mail on the envelope and nicer on the letter.  My ED/DD/CEO simply will not sign a letter with a return address formatted to USPS regulations -- they will get kicked back every time.  And if they see that on an invite or thank you, those envelopes are going to have to be printed again.  Our mailhouse will format bulk mail for us though unless we ask them not to for certain lists.


I think that many donors (and consumers in general) are much savvier than they get credit for.  No amount of live non-profit presort stamps (or even just live 1st class stamps) will fool someone who receives an envelope formatted in all caps and with a bar code.  I did recently get some mail addressed to me using one of those handwriting services that uses a real pen.  I opened it up right away -- silly me .  It was definitely bulk mail and still got where it was going.


But my mailing list is also not typically over 10k, so maybe that makes a difference. 


My mail house also returns the updates in both regular and USPS format, but...

AddressAccelerator (and to some extent AddressFinder) - which is worth the money in my opinion - will standardize regardless of your preference or how staff enters it so that first and foremost everythign is consistent.