Blackbaud Focus on Your Feedback … Counties Are Updated in Address Accelerator! (UK Specific)

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As many of you know, Royal Mail stopped updating Counties in 1996 when Optical Character Recognition equipment was introduced and then, in 2000, the County was removed from the Postcode Address File, which is the UKAddr.PAF file used by Address Accelerator when validating addresses.

At the time customers had asked that County still be populated by Address Accelerator and the 3rd party software used by Address Accelerator was re-programmed to include this, even though it was no longer being updated by Royal Mail.

Recently the 3rd party software programme was re-written and during that process the way Counties were populated was changed to use the following –

  1. From the Traditional Postal Counties database: Held by Royal Mail.  The Traditional Postal Counties is generally accurate, but does not contain data for large Towns/Cities.
  2. Historical Postal Counties database.  Held by Royal Mail.  This is used where no County is found in the previous database search, and commonly contains older County values that can result in the County being inaccurate
    For example post codes in the Manchester area, like M16, M22, M23 and so on were returning the historical county of Cheshire.
    Or post codes in Peterborough, for example PE7 returning the historical and now defunct county of Huntingdonshire.

Following this recent change and based on your feedback, in conjunction with our 3rd party supplier, we have now reverted to using the previous postal Counties data and this change is included in the latest release of Address Accelerator for April to June 2014 now available for Download (as of 27/03/2014).

So, for the above examples, the listed post codes in the Manchester area now return Lancashire and Peterborough post code area PE7 now returns Cambridgeshire.

Important Note -

As Royal Mail no longer maintains Counties, then the County will never be updated. See the following from Royal Mail for more information: http://www.royalmail.com/personal/help-and-support/How-do-I-address-my-mail-correctly

Therefore you may wish to consider removing County from the address block for addresses in the UK.

This is done via Config, International where the fields used in the Address Block are specified at the bottom portion of the Country record.

County location in via Config, International

 

Related Knowledgebase solutions:

How to Install / Update Address Accelerator  (Updated by Blackbaud if we host your data)

How to add or edit Countries

Let me know if you have any question or comments below.
News Raiser's Edge® Blog 03/26/2014 7:08am EDT

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