ensuring only one mailing piece goes to a residence

Diana Gray 2

Hello friends.  We are a high school, and often we have separate constituents who are parent, alumni, grandparents living at one address.  When doing these mailings, we need to cull the list down so there is one mailing per address (each constituent has an addressee/salutation = "The Smith Residence".)


Does anyone have a method for achieving this?


Right now we export all constituents on the mailing list to a spreadsheet and review this list of thousands and flag the one constituent at a given address who will get the mailing.  We do this 3/4 times per year!

JoAnn Strommen

It will take some work but my suggestion would be solicit code on records not receiving the mailing. And also upkeep to remove solicit code if alumni moves away from home.  


You may want to search the forums as there are numerous posts on this subject. Try words like same address, duplicate.

Diana Gray 2

Thank you very much!

 

Diana Gray  
I 
Database Administrator

Flintridge Preparatory School

4543 Crown Avenue

La Ca?ada Flintridge, CA 91011

P: 818.949.5547

E:dgray@flintridgeprep.org

W: www.flintridgeprep.org

 

 

Melissa S Graves

I still do this manually. We have decided not to de-duplicate when it comes to solicitations as we now target our asks and may ask parents for $500 and alumni for $25 and Grandparents for $100. This also helps us catch alumni when they finally move out of the house if we mail separately instead of to the whole family. So we now do it much less frequently. I decided that a solicit code or attribute was going to far too much work and unreliable as it then needs to be checked every time someone changes and address or we do NCOA. I would be too fearful that we are continually removing someone who now lives somewhere else or not removing someone who moved back home and did not get the code. I just painstakingly de-duplicate each list when I need to.

Mergen Peries

Same here, don't think there is a way around it.  Head of household deals with the couple/spouse relationships, but probably won't be enough to catch all your different relationships.

https://kb.blackbaud.com.au/articles/Article/48275


The next time you do your sift, might be worth adding the addressee/saluation eg 'smith family residence' to the single record you have decided to post to.  If you make sure the other records don't have that, might make it easier to do your sift, the next time around.

Diana Gray 2

Thank you!   There are two
possibilities I am considering.

 

1.      
 Because every household has the residence
addressee/salutation ie “The Smith Residence”, I may end up coding
(via constituent attribute) each one that was selected as the
chosen constituent to receive the mailing at a given address. 
This will require data maintenance – whenever we receive an address
update will need to make certain this attribute is updated, as
well.

 

2.      
Alicia Barevich, responded to another similar posting with how she
handles multiple mailings.  This avoids adding a constituent
attribute that will need to be maintained.  To paraphrase her
posting - she does a few mailings per year this way:

 

I sort the
spreadsheet by Address Line 1, then Const Code and and class year,
so that the top line is the addresse who should receive the
mailing.


Concatenate Addressline 1 + City, then Copy, paste-values


New column formula something like =if(A3=A2, "dup", "keep"), where
A is the column with the concatenated string. Copy your dup/keep
row, paste as values.


Glance through spreadsheet for addresses that look like college
addresses. For example, all students at St. Olaf or Carleton use
the Commons address as their mailing address. Therefore, we could
have 5 separate students at the same address. This isn't foolproof,
but they're often fairly easy to identify (1500 St. Olaf Avenue,
and 5 recent grads at that address gives you a bit of an idea). For
any found, manually change the tag to "keep"


Sort column by dup/keep. Delete all "dup" rows.


Done!


It sounds complicated, but as long as you don't scritinize for the
colleges too much, it shouldn't take more than 30 minutes once you
get the hang of it.

 

 

 

Diana Gray  
I 
Database Administrator

Flintridge Preparatory School

4543 Crown Avenue

La Ca?ada Flintridge, CA 91011

P: 818.949.5547

E:dgray@flintridgeprep.org

W: www.flintridgeprep.org

 

 

Bob Wiebe

I also use a concatenation formula based on address. It returns groups of 2, 3 or 4 addresses shared by individuals.  It is built so that all the names at that address are absorbed into the address, e.g. John & Mary and Kyle and Taylor Swift Wiebe.  I hope it acts as a prompt, upon seeing the long handle, for addressees to tell us that their offspring have moved out of the house.