We are finding that the it's difficult to get accurate sales analysis by zip code because of the high number of constituent records that have the same zip code as our business address. It has been our default to use the city, state, and zip from our business address for night-of-show walk-up sales or any transaction where we can not get an address or the customer refuses to give the address. The result of this is that it appears sales in that zip code are off the charts. We can't eliminate this zip code from analysis because it actually does include the majority of our customer base.
I'm curious to know what other organizations use as the "default address" when a real address can not be entered? What do you enter for the street information? Is it the policy to automatically mark these undeliverable or mark it in such a way to encourage getting an accurate address in the future?
Thank you in advance for the feedback!
Chuck Buchanan
92nd Street Y
We, too, use 99999 as our default Zip (and street1) for unknown addresses, with the accompanying city of "UPDATE ADDRESS".
We have some patrons that join a particular web mailing list which doesn't even require a name for signup, and for these we are using fname = "UPDATE", lname = "NAME", also.
Chris, we do the exact same for our e-newsletter registrations and I thought it was such a novel brilliant idea! Always one step ahead... ;-)
Hi, Kjersten.
Yes, great minds think alike, plus "UPDATE NAME" is a much better name than "99999 99999". :-)
Why not do a general public sale for walk-ups? If you're not going to collect information anyway, that would keep these accounts out of your analysis.
Unknown said: Why not do a general public sale for walk-ups? If you're not going to collect information anyway, that would keep these accounts out of your analysis.
We do try to collect info, for all patrons, even walk-ups, but have these values for when that isn't possible for one reason or another. If we have even one or two pieces of information, it may be possible to fill in the rest later, and if not, it is easy to suppress patrons with consistently applied "dummy" values for Zip, etc.