Preferred Address Clean Up

Dylan Medina

Started running large scale mailing exports and am realizing that in the past for employees of a company they would give the employee the same address as the company. Also fun things like putting a contact name as Address Line 1. I'm wondering if there is a best way to query based off duplicate addresses or is my best bet to just do large exports and find duplicates in Excel and import the changes back in?

Newer to my role and hoping to do lots of cleaning in the future so any other advice on general clean up would be appreciated! (Signed up for the Spring Cleaning Webinar later this month!)

Miki Martin

@Dylan Medina first, welcome to Community! Sounds like you have your hands full, for sure. You will definitely need to segment the clean-up and each step will likely be multiple steps. I think you will likely need a combination of export, import and global updates. I did something similar for salutations at my prior organization and the segmenting took time but getting to the point where it was almost complete and seeing so many fewer options was quite rewarding. I’m sure others will have some great ideas to tackle this, too, but here are my initial thoughts.

I would start with an export of the data. Be sure you have the Constituent ID, Import ID, plus all address information (not just address, city, state and zip but also address type, whether it’s marked as preferred and even the Address Import ID). With this you can group those with same/similar addresses to determine co-workers in a specific organization. Add that organization with the address to RE if it isn’t already. You can then create a relationship import to link them all to the organization, being sure to mark them as an employee and labeling the relationship with the necessary info and marking primary business information and mark the address as preferred.

In your exported data, you could change the unnecessary address type to something like Delete. Then you could import the type with the address import ID so it updates the address type. There is a plug-in in database view, Alternate Address Deleter, that will globally delete an alternate address type. This is why it would be critical to mark the business address as preferred.

As far as other cleanup: I had bookmarked a blog some time ago: Quick Tips for Database Maintenance in Raiser’s Edge and Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT. Someone shared a template of a schedule you can set up and others mention various folders and queries. You can also search in Community and the Facebook user group for ideas, as well.

Hope this helps! Good luck.

Dylan Medina

@Miki Martin
Thanks so much Miki! This gives me a great place to start! It's definitely a long game to get everything cleaned up and maintain it!