Best practices for address/phone types and historical tracking

Michelle Norfleet

Hello Everyone,

We are in the process of updating address/phone types. We have historical address/phone types that we are still using and we have the address/phone types that we have moved to using as the standard over the last seven years.  We also have updated data from a PeopleFinder search that returned a wealth of information. We haven’t determined the best way to compare this data to what we already have and maintain a more clean system. I think this will be more on global changes for me to make, but I am interested in hearing how others handled similar projects.

What are other universities doing to transition from using one address/phone type to another? How are you managing this type of project as well? We are looking to update our SOP with some data entry standards that can be used for any team member that will work on this project?

I know this is a lot and I really appreciate any and all insight I can get.

Michelle Norfleet

 

Amelia Ketzle

Hi, Michelle - 


I hope this isn't too late to be of some help!  You're right - that is a lot!  ?  When you say "historical address/phone types", what do you mean exactly?  Do you just mean address/phone types your organization no longer wants to use (so the types will be inactivated and existing phones/addresses with those types perhaps cleaned up)?  Or do you mean literal address/phone types for past home/phones?  I ask this b/c we are currently converting from Advance to RE, and in Advance, addresses and phones both had a separate type for Past Home and Past Business.  These were system requirements, so we had to use them.  In my opinion, they are goofy, as they are redundant to the Status of Inactive and require data entry operators to keep them in sync.


Anyway, with that asked, here is how we have handled some of the cleanup you describe.  (I am describing this from our previous database, Advance, since that is where my current experience lies.  I have not yet done this in RE.)  We would dump all the existing Address records of certain types, for example, using a report we had.  We would include current Home address, Alternate Home, and most recent past home address.  This would be sent to NCOA or a vendor to try to get updated addresses.  When the return file came, back, we would export that into Excel and strip the address lines of things like punctuation, directionals, St., Rd., etc.  We would do the same to the file we are comparing against (say, an NCOA file).  We would compare the returned address to the existing addresses to determine if we should update them or not.  For example, if the NCOA address was the same as a previous home address, and we had a home address on file with a relatively recent date, we would not import that address update from NCOA.  We have a series of rules for how we process these files when they come back.  I'd be happy to share them with you, although some of it may not make a lot of sense since it's coming from Advance rather than RE.  But, the business rule and practices are probably still solid and may be helpful.  If you are interested, please let me know.  


I'm not positive what you meant about "transitioning from one address/phone type to another".  If you want to elaborate, I'll give my two cents on that, too.  ?