How do you get address updates into eTap?

Eric Jacobs

We started with eTap a few months ago, and after I did my first Address Finder/NCOA run, I had a couple hundred addresses it labelled bad. I did a mass update to mark them Do Not Mail in my database. Now, the question is, how to get updated addresses? I found that we had email addresses for more than 80% of the records with bad snail mail addresses, so I thought I'd send an email to all those constituents and ask them to fill in our DIY Contact form to update their address. Unfortunately, I've now discovered that this doesn't work, and I've created a lot of work for myself.


If an existing constituent fills out a DIY Contact form again, one of two things happens: a duplicate record is created, or a journal entry is created in the existing account. What does NOT happen is any updating of addresses! So for the former, I need to examine the old account and the new account, merge them, determine what data should update or replace existing data, one constituent at a time. For the latter, I need to read through every Journal entry, doing copying and pasting to manually update address fields for those whose new address info was merely entered into a Journal note. (We capture a number of other user-defined fields in addition to name, address, phone and email, so in some cases, part of the information in the old record should be retained and part from the new record should be retained.) For a handful of people, this would be no problem, but for dozens at a time, it's time-consuming and potentially error prone.


Now I'm coming to discover the same situation exists when people make donations: I have to scour every journal entry accompanying each donation to see if I need to manually update their address information.


I thought moving to eTap would automate a lot of this updating of constituent information, but it seems painfully crude and manual. I'm hoping other users might suggest better ways of having user-provided address updates update your database. Or do you do it all by hand? Thanks!