Hi everyone,
I'm reassessing how our Membership department handles name formatting for mailings, and how we manage that data in Tessitura. Historically, we have gone in to Tessitura records after memberships are sold to manually fix any capitalization errors, add prefixes (Mr, Ms, etc) and un-abbreviate things like "Ave" or "Rd" so that our labels will be as professional as possible. I'd love to keep that data standard, but WOW does it take a lot of staff time! I'm working on hacking together some excel macros that can help identify the problem records more quickly...but are there other options out there that I'm not thinking of? For instance, we could leave the Tessitura records as is and use the Excel "proper" command to fix capitalization every time we export a list for a mailing. How are the rest of you balancing having beautifully clean data in the database vs the amount of staff time required? We have 30,000 members so doing things manually is quite overwhelming.
Thanks!
Beth
We are also using the address verification add-on from QAS. I think it's great, (our addresses are super clean!) but in terms of your wanting to replace abbreviations like Ave or Rd with the full words, I think it might have the opposite effect. In our system, all of our addresses are formulated with the USPS standard abbreviations for street suffixes, directions, etc. Maybe it's a configurable option though? I'm sure they'd be more than happy to talk with you.