Automatic Region Assignments

Carley Haynes

I'm guessing no, but does anyone know of a way that I can get RE to automatically assign a region to a constituent based on the city/town name? 

If this is not possible automatically would the alternative be using a query to group constituents with certain city/town names and globally add/change their region on their record?


Does anyone use regions like this and if so, how do you manage them? 


For background, we have two regional offices that take care of a specific geographical area. I'd like to be able to group constituents based on those area's so that the regional teams can easily look up and get information on constituents in their area's as well as have others looking at the records to instantly know which region that constituent 'belongs' to. At the moment there are so many small towns and cities that it's almost impossible for development officers to know off the top of their heads which region a constituent is based in just by the city/town name alone.


Thank you in advance! 

Gina Gerhard

Carley - We do regional assignments for all our records and I do it using queries and then globally adding (if there are a lot of them, if just a few I do them manually).

My queries to find the towns are quite lengthy but I did build them as towns, perhaps it might be better to build them by zip code?


Wondering if Zeidman's product 'Validatrix' might be able to do this type of function for you?


 

Carley Haynes

Gina Gerhard:

Carley - We do regional assignments for all our records and I do it using queries and then globally adding (if there are a lot of them, if just a few I do them manually).

My queries to find the towns are quite lengthy but I did build them as towns, perhaps it might be better to build them by zip code?


Wondering if Zeidman's product 'Validatrix' might be able to do this type of function for you?


 

thanks Gina! I'll take a look into it, although I'm guessing if I can do it via global delete the answer will be no! 

Gina Gerhard

Carley -


Also because we want to have the region identified on ALL our records, its the ones that fall outside our region that are the most problematic -- because they would be virtually anywhere so how do you query on them.  So I run the regional checks, enter the data and then check for records that don't have the region -- and they make the 'outside region' assignment.


And also a complication we have is that it doesn't necessary tie to a current address -- if the constituent USED to live in our region and then moves to Florida, we keep the original regional assignment -- so there's not always direct tie into an address.


 

Carley Haynes

Gina Gerhard:

Carley -


Also because we want to have the region identified on ALL our records, its the ones that fall outside our region that are the most problematic -- because they would be virtually anywhere so how do you query on them.  So I run the regional checks, enter the data and then check for records that don't have the region -- and they make the 'outside region' assignment.


And also a complication we have is that it doesn't necessary tie to a current address -- if the constituent USED to live in our region and then moves to Florida, we keep the original regional assignment -- so there's not always direct tie into an address.


 

that sounds messy! Ha! I'll definitely look into the global change. I think ours will be based on current address, but I will clarify that as the regional managers may want to keep that relationship going.... so much to think about on what initially seemed a straight forward idea!  

Gina Gerhard

Yes, messy indeed and like you picked up on a perfect example of a seemingly 'simple' request that when you dig a bit deeper isn't so simple after all.

If it's based on an address, it's a bit easier -- but what if the address changes, how will you know to reassign the region?

Can you query the system to find where the region no longer matches the address.

Do you have records with no addresses - what region do you pick (perhaps one named 'Unassigned")