Expanding Out of State with Counties/Regions

Tristany Corgan

Hi there! I would love it if anyone who manages RE for a larger, national organization might be able to provide some insight on how you use the County/Region tables in RE.

Historically, most of our fundraising has been done in Florida; however, we are in the process of expanding nationally and stewarding donors in other states. Currently, our County table lists all Florida counties and a “Non Florida” county option for out of state addresses, but our Development officers are wanting to begin tracking what counties our donors are in in certain states.

Do you just put all counties, regardless of the state, in the County table? We’re worried that putting so many options in the table may be overwhelming. Do you use address attributes to track counties/regions at all? Thank you!

Karen Diener 2

@Tristany Corgan I think it makes the most sense to add the county if you need that information, but I would definitely try to do it via an ongoing data append service rather than look up the county whenever adding a new record.

AddressAccelerator, which is a Blackbaud product and extra cost, allows you to automatically validate address as you enter them as well as via batch functionality. It formats addresses to meet post office standards, appending the +4 to the ZIP code, adding the county, and adding some other post office information that the owner of a mail house once told me is meaningless. But the county is helpful! :-)

I'm sure there are a lot of other tools out there which may be less expensive, but then you'll bear the cost of staff time to import the information.

Karen