Preferred Addresses

Jan Ette Oakley:

I feel like there should be a simple answer for this, but I haven't came up with anything so I'm tossing it to the group.

I have constituents in our database who are the primary contact for their work/employer.  Then they also have their spouse listed in RE because we like to send to them at their home.  For one reason or the other, we don't currently have some of these people's home address.  So, I mark their work address as their preferred address on their account, since I don't have anything else.  Then, when I go to do a mailing that is a solicitation where we want to send to the company contacts and to the individuals listed, I choose "If a contact also receives this mailing as an individual: Mail to both addresses separately."  This works beautifully for all those that have home addresses; however, those that do not, I end up with

Mr. and Mrs. John Smith                McDonalds            123 N Main Street, Guthrie, OK 73044

and

Mr. John Smith                McDonalds            123 N Main Street, Guthrie, OK 73044

I don't want that first listing with the spouse's name going to his work.  I only want to send that household mail if they have a home address.  I thought about choosing to only send to Home Address from the Individual Tab in Mail instead of Preferred Address, but I don't want to exclude those who aren't married that we only have their work address.  Long story short, I'm just trying to figure out how to dedup these people out of my mailing without manually doing it in the Excel spreadsheet.

Does anyone else deal with this?  If so, can you tell me how you get around this?

 Thanks, Jan Ette

I don't know of a simple answer... hopefully someone else will have a suggestion.  Will keep thinking on it...

I do have a question, not sure of your mailing size, but you might consider sending your address file to a local mailer, not for them to do the mailing, but just for address updates.  They may be able to get you the home addresses for a number of the individuals that you have work addresses for.  We don't have the address update program through BB so we sent file to our mailers before our last capital campaign because several prospect lists we were working with were not recent data. We felt the fee was worth getting the correct NCOA data.  Was like $.035 per address or $10 minimum.  Just an idea. 

(If you do send them a file and get one back that you want to import the address changes on, be sure to include Constituent ID/Import ID in your export.)

Just a thought...

Lindy Steen:
Hi Jan- On the record with an incomplete address, can you mark the check box on the record as "has no valid address" and then by the address section click on "more" and un-check "send mail to this address"? Just a thought. Lindy Steen HPH Hospice

Lindy,

I'm not following...why would you want to check 'has no valid address'?  I wouldn't want to start unchecking send mail to this address just to exclude someone from a mailing.  I think you'd end up with a mess in the long run.

As I read the post, the addresses are valid it's just that Jan wants to not send mail to work address addressed to Mr & Mrs.... but doesn't want to exclude work address type as it is the only type on some records and she wants to include those who are just individuals. 

Melissa Graves:

I agree - I do not think unchecking the send mail/checking has no valid address is appropriate. It only works when you have a mailing where both records qualify. If you had a mailing where one or the other qualifies but not both, you want that record to have the send mail checkbox checked.

For me, this may come down to a manual inspection of your mailfile before sending. I have started sorting by address line 1 and adding a calculated field to a new colum and I have a formula similar to =A2=A3 which gives you a true/false result. True if the address you are on and the address above (or below) is the exact same and false if it is not. I then do conditional formatting to that column making all the true cells turn red. I then look for those red cells indicating I am mailing two pieces to the same address and manually adjust (i.e. remove one of them).

It is not perfect because the address line 1 needs to be exactly te same but if you use addressaccelerator they should be.

 I often have an issue with this too.  For full constituent records that are the contact at an org I wish I could assign an org specific addressee/salutation because spouses muck it up.  And we often mail to some people as the contact AND as the individual in the same mailing.  And we have some full constituents who are the contact for multiple orgs  (a lawyer who represents multiple estates or trustee who represents many family foundations) and the address we use is not always the same for each org. 

I also find that if I want to make one run of letter the addressee/salutation option is use this or use that, but sometimes I would like more than 2 options.

I know that some people decided that they want to address it to Mr. and Mrs. regardless of whether it is at home or at work, but I feel that is not always appropriate.  Especially if you're mailing to a woman. I certainly don't want to see Mr. and Mrs. John Smith or even Nicole and John Smith at my work address.  Frankly not even Nicole Jones and John Smith.  Maybe it's a militant feminist view, but if you are addressing me professionally I suggest you address me individually. 

RE doesn't have an easy or fool proof way to do this. Like Melissa, there is some manual review for us.

Melissa Graves:

Nicole there is one solution I like to use that may help. Wherever a married person is also a contact for an organization recommend creating additional add/sals called contact addressee and contact salutation and it would include only the person who is a contact and not the couple. (If both married people are the contacts such as in a family business I simply do not add these).

So for example, when pulling from mail for the individual I pull primary addressee and for the organization contact I pull contact addressee else primary addressee. (these are all options in mail) This would result in the one going to home having Mr. and Mrs. and the one going to her office only says Mrs.

This solution does not help when you have the company address on the individual record as in the original example. This only works from the organization record when there is a contact record linked to a married person and you are mailing to the org record.

I have a similar work around that helps (Individual addressee formal, individual address informal, etc).  It's not perfect.

If you have a non-constituent record that is linked to a spouse and an org (or 15 orgs for that matter) , you have the option of changing the addressee/salution for each relationship.  I would think that having the option to do this with full constituents would alleviate a lot of this hassle and creating all these addressee/salutation types on the record.