NCOA Processing

We're starting to talk about getting this set up at the Science Museum...will let you know what we learn!  Do you have any specific questions?

I am having a meeting today on exactly that topic.  We have company names in Opt. Address as well and it has caused some trouble with the import file. Specifically, while that field allows 55 characters, the import file format only allows 30. So in some cases that field is too big which is preventing import. We are not using MBS, but I am using the utility to get the addresses in and out.

My suggestion for the company name at our location will be to add it to the second line of the salutation and leave the Opt. Address line blank unless it really is part of the address. 

I'll let you know if anything comes out of our user group discussion today.

Tom Brown,

Jon Slater of The Huntington Theatre here.  Thanks for speaking with me by telephone in December.  We are ready to take the plunge with MBS and hope to export a file tomorrow (1/29/10). 

I was a little bit concerned earlier today when I noticed in the export utility an optional parameter of Include Address Types.  I am presuming that leaving this blank will only export the primary address?  In my case this would be about 250,000 records.  If leaving this blank exports ALL addresses then the quantity will be much higher and the process will be more expensive than we anticipate.  Have any thoughts on this???

Thanks,

Jon

Hi Jon,

We just finished our first NCOA run with MBS (and overall things worked quite smoothly).  If anyone else wants to hear about our experiences we're happy to share.

To answer your question about the Include Address Types parameter, if you leave it blank it exports all addresses on the record, not just the primary.  The utility does not, however, export Inactive addresses.

Unknown said:

Tom Brown,

Jon Slater of The Huntington Theatre here.  Thanks for speaking with me by telephone in December.  We are ready to take the plunge with MBS and hope to export a file tomorrow (1/29/10). 

I was a little bit concerned earlier today when I noticed in the export utility an optional parameter of Include Address Types.  I am presuming that leaving this blank will only export the primary address?  In my case this would be about 250,000 records.  If leaving this blank exports ALL addresses then the quantity will be much higher and the process will be more expensive than we anticipate.  Have any thoughts on this???

Thanks,

Jon

 

Hi, we are just starting our first NCOA run with MBS.  We only like to export primary address.  What is the best way to accomplish that?

Best regards,

Diana

Yes, after reviewing the documentation and the NCOA utility, it does not appear to be a straight forward way to export only primary address, so I am trying to figure out the best work-around.

I really can't think of anything, but I'll let you know if any brilliant ideas pop into my head. 

Something to bear in mind if you do find a way to export only primary addresses: If your users run any of the Labels and Letters reports to generate a list of addresses for a mailing and use Mailing Date, Mailing Purpose, etc... they will probably pull addresses other than just the Primary Address and you won't necessarily be NCOA compliant.  Here at the museum we inactivate addresses we know are bad and that saves a bit on the cost of the NCOA processing.

Unknown said:

Yes, after reviewing the documentation and the NCOA utility, it does not appear to be a straight forward way to export only primary address, so I am trying to figure out the best work-around.

Hi all,

We at the Science Museum have indeed taken the leap! We pulled our first export on January 15.  Overall I'd say it went well; my IT colleagues tell me that the technical end (eg pulling the lists, exporting, and importing) all went very smoothly.  The more challenging pieces are 1) figuring out all the business rules you might want in place and 2) dealing with the inevitable odd situations. 

If anyone has questions about the process, we'd be happy to help out if we can.  But in the meantime, I thought I'd post the most recent odd situation we've found, both as a warning and a cry for help: we're finding some instances in which we have information in the "optional address" line that the NCOA process erases.

1) Patrons who give us both a street address and a PO Box or RR #.  Historically, these had been entered using both the "Street Address" and the "Optional address" fields. However, the NCOA process "erased" whatever was in the optional address in most of those cases, because the process doesn't consider this two-line address to be the standardized version.

2) Individual accounts for which the patron has a "care of" or "Attention" line.  Again, these had been put in the "Optional address" line, as they are, in effect, optional addresses...the trouble is, NCOA treats them as "un-standard" and erases them when it standardizes the address.

3) And thirdly, individuals who want to receive their mail at a business address.  They need to be individual constituent types, so we know they are working with us as an individual and not as a representative of the company.  But as an individual, the only data lines we have in the address itself are for name 1, name 2, and the main or optional street addresses.  Again, we used to list it in the optional line, but the NCOA wipes that line clean when it standardizes. 

Our workaround for these issues include various tricks...for business names/titles we're using salutations, and for the moment the PO Boxes are just being archived and we're trusting that the mail will reach them at the street address.  But this is not ideal; I think it's a little much to expect every frontline staffer to be fluent in the use of salutations and NCOA so they can fiddle with every "care of" or "send this to me at work" request.

I've submitted this on the Next Gen forum as well so they can tackle the issue there...but in the meantime, does anyone have any clever thoughts regarding how to deal with c/o, po boxes, etc.?

Shellie Sullivan with the Kansas City Repertory Theatre.  I would be very interested in hearing about your experience with NCOA.  I am getting ready to begin this process and we are also using MBS.  I'd be very appreciative of any advice you'd be willing to share including things to watch out for, potential problems, issues you ran into, etc. 

We are doing the phone update as well.  Did you also have MBS do this for you?  Did you do any tweaking of the standard code behind the scenes (for instance, to select only the primary addresses?)

Thanks for your wilingness to share your experiences concerning NCOA!

Shellie

One other thing I forgot to put in my last post, concerns the problems that Science Museum of  Minnesota encountered with the Opt address being wiped out.  Does the NCOA process actually delete old addresses - or does it rather just inactivate them and keep them in history?  I was thinking I could possibly pull the Opt Address field back in after I've run the process.    Thanks again for any information.

Shellie Sullivan

Kansas City Rep Theatre

Unknown said:

 Does the NCOA process actually delete old addresses - or does it rather just inactivate them and keep them in history?  I was thinking I could possibly pull the Opt Address field back in after I've run the process.    Thanks again for any information.

Shellie Sullivan

Kansas City Rep Theatre

The NCOA utility overwrites the address.  It does not create a new address and inactivate the old one.  However you can still see the old address in the audit trail (go to Transactions and select the Audit radio button).

Unknown said:

We are doing the phone update as well.  Did you also have MBS do this for you?  Did you do any tweaking of the standard code behind the scenes (for instance, to select only the primary addresses?)

Thanks for your wilingness to share your experiences concerning NCOA!

Shellie

We chose not to do the phone update so I can't answer any questions about that process.  We also did not tweak any of the code, just used it as is.  Technically the process was very straight forward and pretty seamless.  One thing we did that I would highly recommend was making a copy to our Test environment after pulling the export for NCOA.  That way when the files came back from MBS we could import them and then apply the changes into Test first rather than going straight to Production.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

This is a concern.  I know SQL well enough, I'm thinking I could create a table to store constituents with the optional address field along with the account id.  Then after I do the processing of the import data I could possibly pull these fields back in to the optional address field from my table based on the account id. 

I totally LOVE your advice about bringing this into TEST first.  That will be a great place for a trial run of this.  I'd feel better if the addresses were being made inactive - rather than overwritten.  All the more reason for doing the TEST run first.  Thanks so much for your help.