Preferred Address Duplicates Between Constituents

Miki Martin

Hello, all. I hope I'm not repeating something here, as I couldn't find anything. Many of our alumnae (all girls school) live locally and can tend to move into another alum's house. As a result, we have a lot of duplicate addresses for different families. I ran an NCOA update two months ago and am still having a lot of duplicate addresses. Does RE have a way to flag or notify you if you're adding an address that's already in use by another Constituent? That would be so helpful.


For instance, I have John and Jan Smith living at 123 Main St, Somewhere KY. Then I show Anna Robinson at that same address. They are not related. Instead of exporting an address list to Excel to mark duplicates and track down which is right, is there a way, when I'm updating Anna's address, that the Smith's address pops up telling me they're already listed there and prompting me, at least, to check where they may have moved?


I've been working for several months on cleaning up our data, as it wasn't always done very well and we have had a lot of duplicates added. I have already removed many by merging and cleaning out but still have a ways to go. Any help you all can offer would be great. Thanks so much!

Dariel Dixon

I think the biggest issue with this is that you'll never know until you run the NCOA that the address changed to a shared address.  It's tough, but I think that the way the situation is set up, it may cause more problems that it solves.  Particularly, when one of the roommates moves out.  I don't think sharing the address from the other constituent is a good idea either, because they will obviously separate at some point in time. RE won't make any assumptions on the address, unless there is a relationship set up already (business, spouse, etc.)


I think the shared address flag is better served for familial relationships. 


I don't know if there is a importing plug-in or tool that will give you this information upon entry or not.

Aldera Chisholm

This would be helpful - we have a lot of people in our database who were imported from a membership list, which means we have hundreds of spouses that are not connected. If I could have duplicate addresses highlighted somehow when we opened a record to edit, it would be a huge help to try to link those households together correctly. I was trying to think of a query that could run, that could then be linked to a business rule to pop up, but I can't think of a way to do it. Hopefully someone else pipes up with a good suggestion for you!

Stephanie Horn

If you need a way to identify just how many spouse records may be unlinked or simply identify multiple constituent records with the same address, this may work:

1. Run a basic label parameter with a query of constituents (if applicable) and make sure that only the "Mail only to constituents marked "Head of household" is enabled AND the "Create output query" checkbox is enabled.
2. If you don't already have one, create an export that pulls the preferred address info as well as well as a few constituent identity fields (RE ID, Name, etc.).  There's a "Linked?" value that can be exported (but not queried on) for addresses. I don't use it much now but wanted to let you know it's there.
3. Use your output query from step 1. to export the data into excel. 
4. Tell excel to identify duplicates by address line 1 (excel defaults to shading the cell in red)
5. Sort spreadsheet by duplicate address line 1.  

Note: the above steps work well for me because we use address accelerator which auto-formats our addresses making it super easy for identifying records with the duplicate address components. If your org doesn't use address accelerator you may have to spend more time "eyeballing" those addresses.

  

Hope this is helpful.

On a side note, I agree with Dariel Dixon's post.  He always has great feedback.