Gone Away/Returned Mail process

As long as you uncheck the “send mail” for the invalid address, and mark the record as having “no valid address” that is all you have to do. And, with doing this, the address will not be pulled in any of your mailing lists, unless you include invalid addresses in your criteria.

You're welcome! Also, one other thing, you may want to add a note in the “Note” tab noting the reason for marking the address invalid, due to returned mail. It is always good to have notes that you can look back on and know why a change was made.

Karen, we do as @JoAnn Strommen does, with the attribute and drop-down box. Highly recommend, so that you can select specific groups of donors during mailings, people-finder appends, etc. Also second the vote of keeping the invalid address listed on the Bio 1 record, so that you can pull it for append services and during constituent look-ups.

The one difference in our process is that we require two returns before marking them invalid. That is because we have had numerous instances of returned mail from addresses we knew were valid – either the donor or our staff confirmed. If the address block is a tiny bit smudged so a machine can't read it – especially in bulk mailings – or if you have a novice postal worker, mail can be returned with a lovely yellow sticker, even with a valid address. So, one of our drop-down menu options is “Returned 1st time- not removed.”

Additionally, we implement a search step for returned mail when a donor has a significant relationship. We may call them if we have their number, or else we keep a subscription with Whitepages which allows us to look up replacement addresses and phone numbers. Only if we are unable to procure a replacement address do we mark them “invalid address” in RE.

We start by emailing them, if we have their email address. If we don't have it, we'll email one of their relatives if we can and ask them to forward the message. If we are unable to get their new address, we add a solicit code “Lost Address” and tick the “no valid addresses” box - we switched to using solicit codes for contact preferences a while ago, when we started adding consent records. We also add a notepad with the reason for marking the address as lost/invalid. We used to have a two-stage process, where we would add an attribute “mail returned” and only mark the address as lost the second time mail was returned - we have found that mail is sometimes returned from valid addresses. We stopped doing that because almost all of our communications are electronic now - the only regular thing we mail out is our alumni magazine once a year - so it no longer seemed worthwhile. We do leave the old address in Bio 1 as it's useful to know what their last valid address was.

Karen Mitchell:

Hi Steve - how do you do that on web view? I've set up the process on database view, now I find out that most staff will only be able to use web view (due to the computers they are using…long story) and the address custom fields are not visible, neither is ‘has no valid addresses’.

I'm surprised to see that ‘has no valid addresses’ doesn't feed through to the web view, however, we add ‘Lost Address’ as a solicit code in Bio 1, it then appears at the top of the record in web view.

Karen Mitchell:

I was thinking of having a ‘address type’ of gone away - so when you untick ‘send mail to this address’ and change the address type to ‘gone away’. hopefully that will work.

Have you tried using a solicit code?