Cell phones vs land lines

Patty Neumeier · November 2015

Does anyone know of a service that can help determine which phone numbers in our database are cell phones and which are land lines? I don't think Blackbaud offers this.

Daniel Noga 2 · November 2015

No, but I just subscribed because I would love to see a solution to this.

To help clarify this sort of thing, we recently added some phone codes to the Phone Types table. We already had Home, Work, Cell, Business, etc. We also had a separate type to identify Primary numbers, but the problem is that applying that code also took away information about what kind of phone it was. To get around this, we added types of:

Primary (H) for home

Primary (C) for cell

Primary (B) for business

etc.

To help capture this information, we edited our membership and donation forms so that the field for Phone number reads "Primary number (Home/Work/Cell), the idea being that they write down the number, but also circle one so we know what kind of number it is.

We are gradually filling in some of our blanks this way.

Debra Holcomb · November 2015

I don't know if this is related to your question or not, but I'll share it anyways. We always wanted to know the phone type for our phone-a-thon/telemarketing programs, but for many reasons that you already know it's complicated to track the different phone types. (We still us RE 7.93).

So, we created a phone type called 'telemarketing'. We appended this data from our telemarketing vendor. When they send us a file of cleaned up numbers, we just import right over the last telemarketing number. We don't care if it's home, cell or work. We only care that it was the phone used for telemarketing. We don't care if it's duplicating a number already on the record. This has made things so much quicker and easier for us for mass communications.

For individual calls, the number is updated manually when the gift officer or development/research assistant learns the correct number.

John Heizer · November 2015

With "local number portability" I don't think this is possible. For instance, my home number was a standard landline which became an IP phone (Comcast), then cell (AT&T), and is now on Google Voice.

Cell phones vs land lines

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