Invitation Mailing Lists - Specific Address Types

Jennifer Broadwell

Hi all-I am trying to figure out how to best set up addresses for invitations.  Currently, we do not have an address type of invitation.  All invites are typically pulled by preferred address.  The problem is that the salutation and addressee may or may not match the address type.  This is primarily a concern with business addresses because one of two things often happens: 1) we sent an invite address to mr. and mrs. to a business address or 2) if a couple owns a business, we are sending the invite to their business and not their house.


We wouldn't want to pull only home addresses for our invitations because many people do receive our mailings at their place of work.  Can anyone share with me what you have learned, best practices, and/or advice on this?  We recently received a request from a couple who own a business to send all invites to their house.  I don't want to completely change our system to accomodate a few people, but if our current system is inherently flawed, then I would feel justified in changing our processes.


Thanks!

Jennifer Broadwell

jennifer.broadwell@pbrf.org

225-763-2646

Gina Gerhard

Jennifer -


We created an address attribute for constituents which allows us to essentially 'override' their preferred address.  We mostly do this for the situation you're describing, where the preferred address is business but for solicitations or events we want to send mail to the home address and send to the couple jointly.  


So we put an address attribute on the Home address of the constituent as well as their spouse.  

• Then in Address processing, on the 1 Ind Address tab, in Step 2 make sure you choose Preferred Address AND Home (because the address you export may be either of those two types).  
• In Step 3, choose Address Attributes and specify the attribute you've created to mark these addresses.  
• In Output, I also like to include this attribute so I can see the situations where this attribute is 'toggling' over the address.

And then when you produce your mailing list, you may find instances where you're only getting the constituent at their business but really want to send jointly to their home.  You can then go into these records and add the address attribute, so next time they'll get pulled in differently.


It's not perfect and requires some manual maintenance though --

• For example, if you have this attribute on the Home address (which is not their preferred) and then you get a change to their Home address, you have to remember to put this attribute on their new Home address (it won't automatically copy over).  

We typically use the attribute when we produce lists for solicitations and event invitations.

Daniel Bayer

I've dealt with this by using Additional Addressee Types. When exporting the mailing list, I always export Address Type and "Event Addressee" (or another type, depending on what kind of mailing it is) in addition to Primary Address and Primary Addressee. Then in Excel, I sort by type and cut/paste the proper addressee into the Primary Addressee column. It takes a little time to get used to, but once you do, it's a breeze.

Jen Claudy

I have used something similar to Gina's Address Attribute in the past.  Here, we haven't had this issue.  However, I gave up using Primary Addressee/Salutation long ago.  Too much to keep up with.  And I use MS Access to run mailing lists, so I have a series of Additional Addressees/Salutations (added with Default Sets now, initially with a series of Imports).  MS Access looks at the Address Type and then chooses the correct Addr/Sal, just like Daniel does with MS Excel.


So if the Address Type is Home (or Seasonal Home) then it uses Home Addressee and either Home Formal Sal or Home Informal Sal (depending on what my instructions are)...or our CEO's Home Sal.  It took a while to get my system set up, but now, other than occasionally tweaking, it's pretty smooth and easy.  And when changing the Preferred Address from the Home to Business or vice versa, I don't have to even look at the Addressee/Salutation Tab (or trust anyone else to remember to do so).

Jennifer Broadwell

Thanks everyone for the awesome answers!  I really appreciate your input!  What we decided to use an address attribute, which we will export when prepping the list to ensure donors who want invites to go to a certain address are accomodated.


In addition, we're also going to use a solicit code of No Dinner Invite to code certain companies whose primary contact is already on the list bc they meet our other criteria.  Once we export, I will remove those companies from the list after sorting by solicit code.  This way may get a little hairy in terms of keeping it up to date, but I can easily check the last name of the primary contact with the last name of the others on the list through conditional formatting in Excel.  If the primary contact shows up as a dup, I can quickly glance through those to verify those companies need to be removed.  I can also check No Dinner Invite companies that DONT have a duplicate primary contact.  If they don't have a dup, then that likely means the primary contact changed, and I need to update the solicit code.  This code is mainly going to be used as a flag for me to help check to make sure we're not mailing a primary contact twice.


If you guys have a better process, please let me know!

Gina Gerhard

In addition, we're also going to use a solicit code of No Dinner Invite to code certain companies whose primary contact is already on the list bc they meet our other criteria.  Once we export, I will remove those companies from the list after sorting by solicit code.

Jennifer - I'd just throw a word of caution about this one thing above. What happens when that primary contact changes?  If you've now excluded the company based on a certain primary contact, and that contact changes (which they often do) then you may lose track of what's going on here.


You may instead want to investigate the feature available in Mail -- which has a specific feature for the situation where someone is on the list multiple times, as a individual and as a contact at an organzation - and it lets you decide how you want to handle. You can choose to mail to the individual only, mail to them as the contact at the organization, or both.  


And this way, it's nothing that really needs to be maintained with a separate coding schema, but would adapt based on their status as a contact at an organization.

 

Jennifer Broadwell

Gina Gerhard:

In addition, we're also going to use a solicit code of No Dinner Invite to code certain companies whose primary contact is already on the list bc they meet our other criteria.  Once we export, I will remove those companies from the list after sorting by solicit code.

Jennifer - I'd just throw a word of caution about this one thing above. What happens when that primary contact changes?  If you've now excluded the company based on a certain primary contact, and that contact changes (which they often do) then you may lose track of what's going on here.


You may instead want to investigate the feature available in Mail -- which has a specific feature for the situation where someone is on the list multiple times, as a individual and as a contact at an organzation - and it lets you decide how you want to handle. You can choose to mail to the individual only, mail to them as the contact at the organization, or both.  


And this way, it's nothing that really needs to be maintained with a separate coding schema, but would adapt based on their status as a contact at an organization.

 

 

yep, you pin pointed my exact concern.  I must have misunderstood what that feature in Mail actually did.  So, I guess then the proper steps to take would be create the query, feed it into mail, set up all of the appropriate filters, etc., create an output query from that, and use THAT query to pull into the export?

Gina Gerhard

Yes, there have been some prior discussions on the Forum around this feature, and the fact that it is a somewhat hidden feature and only available in Mail (and not Export).

• I seldom use Mail (because it usually isn't quite robust enough) so who would know that this robust feature sits there?  

So you can set up this 'filtering' process in Mail, and then if Mail can't get you what you need then as you state - you can create an Output query in Mail using this 'filtering' process, and pull that into Export to complete what you need to do.