Data Clean Up

When I am cleaning up addressees/salutations, I usually start with a query and export all the salutations and the spouse ID, name and salutations.  That way I can clean up and concatenate large groups of data at the same time (Mr. and Mrs., etc.).  I also make sure the combined salutations for both spouses are the same on the spreadsheet.  Then once I get the data the way I want it, I create a spreadsheet to import into RE using import.  If the spouses have records to change, I can create rows for their data as well.  You may only have 20,000 records, but if your database is like ours, we have 8 salutations per record, so that could amount to 160k changes.  I end up with 5 columns on the import spreadsheet - ID, Addressee Type, Addressee Text, Sequence Number, Editable.  If I want to add all 8 salutations, I could have 8 rows per person, so it all imports at the same time.  Hope this makes sense, but it is way faster than individually keying the corrections.

We recently went through an addressee/salutation project. We wanted to add informal addressee and salutations to all donor records, about 20,000 records. I set up default sets for the informal individual and informal couple to speed up the process. It took two people about 3 months to complete. As we add new folks either individually or through batch we just use the default set and it loads the formal and informal addressee and salutations.


As for addresses - I'd tackle those individually to review all addresses, correct missing links and delete duplicates. I'd also run an Address Finder after the cleanup.