Household Mailings

Laura Marcinkowski

I'm looking for advice on how to set up household mailings. We have alumni who still live at their parents address. For sending communications/newsletters/etc, how do you set these up so EVERYone doesnt get a letter?

Kelly CampionSocol

@Laura Marcinkowski look into the head of household feature, I also have a solicit code to identify duplicate households. Although this is a little clunky and time consuming to manage-I use it in Excel and simply delete those addresses from our mailing lists prior to sending to a printer. We do not do a lot of household mailings so it is not too cumbersome when only doing it occasionally.

JoAnn Strommen

@Laura Marcinkowski Head of Household works well for spousal relationships.

Unfortunately, RE does not have a function for parents/children.

Things we have done or considered:

• When you have your mailing list exported to Excel, do a search for duplicates. Remove duplicate addresses. This does require consistent address format usage to find dups. While in the spreadsheet you can edit addressee if needed to be “Smith family.”
• Tell the mail house to send only one piece per address. (Is whichever they use okay?)
• Use an address type of “Parent's Home” for the students living at home so you can filter by address type. Requires knowing it's parent's address which can be a challenge.
• Use a solicit code or attribute to identify ‘family mail recipient’ or ‘not family mail recipient.'

Just some thoughts.

Miki Martin

@Laura Marcinkowski when I was at my last org, an all girls high school, we ended up creating a new address type of Parent, which @JoAnn Strommen mentioned. This helped a lot. I ended up using it for other situations I came across as well, like where sisters were sharing an address. I would just create a Note to document why someone had that address type. This helped our org drop a good bit of duplicates. The only problem is maintaining it; everyone has to be on the same page.

Laura Marcinkowski

@JoAnn Strommen thank you! so do you pull a query of HoH and then go through the duplicate addresses in case they have children, too? Have you added a specific addressee/salutation too?

JoAnn Strommen

@Laura Marcinkowski Using HOH and then removing duplicates would get children and parents in one mailing piece. I'm trying to remember at previous org, I think we did have an add/sal format of ‘Smith Family.’

Can be tricky removing dups as we are finding a number of alum who share apartments/homes and there are times when we want each to receive the mail piece. There's always some issue.