I'm looking for organizations, particularly consortia, that use or have used the NCOA Utility for address updates/corrections.
We want to explore this but have heard that the utility overwrites the address without leaving an inactive copy of the old address, which contradicts our data audit trail process.
Has anyone used the utility? Has anyone customized the utility to fine-tune it for their organization's needs?
Thanks!Stacey
svoigt@granadasb.org
Hi-
We are looking into the NCOA Utility and I am seeing in past posts the concern of the utility overwriting the old address (without leaving an inactive copy of it, except in the Audit screen). I am curious, why is that important to keep old addresses? Also, can anyone chime in on their frequency they use the NCOA utility? Do you do run it every 90 days to comply with the "95 Day" USPS regulation? Or do you run it less frequently? Thanks in advance!
It's certainly not necessary, but something we desired as an organization. We like to be able to see our customers' residential history, especially as we serve a college community. I think it may also have ramifications for doing historical ticketing and contribution analysis as well.
The main reason we don't use the stock NCOA utility is that we want to be able to manually review address change recommendations for certain classes of constituents (donors mostly). Often our mail transaction address for them may not be their "canonical" address with the post office. The NCOA utility allows you to skip updating certain customers with an exclusion list, but then we won't be notified if that customer has, in fact, moved.
Thanks! And how often do you do your NCOA process?
I think the requirement is quarterly? That's our target, at any rate.