We've just completed our first run of the NCOA Processing Utility (yea!). One unexpected sticky point we ran into is regarding seasonal addresses.
We have a few accounts that have 2 (or more) addresses and we manage when we mail to each one through the month check-boxes. This has worked very well. After we processed the NCOA changes we found that some of these patrons must have submitted change of address forms when they headed out of town because the utility updated the off-season address (meaning we now have 2 identical addresses on the record and have lost the off-season address - other than on the audit tab of course). Has anyone else run into this and found a creative solution?
Here are the ideas we've tossed around already:
1) Mark these accounts on an ad hoc basis so they don't get NCOA'd at all - not ideal because we want to know if they really move.
2) Inactivate both addresses so they don't get run through the utility and have a 3rd address that we let get changed as needed - would be a bit confusing since generally inactive means bad.
3) Set up new address types that we don't run through NCOA at all and again have a 3rd address that we let get changed as needed - a bit messy especially when we're trying to find the correct address for a mailing.
4)?????
Thanks for any thoughts you may have!
Hi, We use a in-house process to handle our NCOAs. We have historically excluded seasonal and web shipping addresses from what we process. In general, the only people who would have a seasonal address with us would be VIPs, and count on staff to maintain those addresses individually. You could always send the seasonals for processing, review what you get back in terms of moves for those addresses, and remove rows if needed from what you get back from the processor if you find them to be inaccurate.
As a rule I would strongly recommend you and your staff reviewing what you get back on NCOAs for your VIPs anyhow, since you can get some cases where addresses come back as (technically) invalid but you don't just want to flag them as inactive if it can be manually corrected. In my experience, this is very likely to happen.
Good luck on you new NCOA adventure and let me know if you have any further questions.