We've just sent out our gala invitations and we've started to receive a good deal of them back because of wrong addresses etc. Last year we went through updating the contact permissions for each person we got a return-to-sender invite from. Obviously, this was a huge undertaking and took our whole development team weeks to complete. Is there a way to bulk update the contact permissions for a list of constituents? My team and I would love an alternative to updating individual records for a month.
I don't know about Contact Permissions, but you might be able to repurpose the NCOA Update utility to delete or inactivate the bad addresses in bulk.
There is a danger to using Contact Permissions to record something like a bad address: the Contact Permission is tied to the customer, not a specific contact point, so if the customer later supplies a valid address, they might still miss communications if this isn't noticed and someone doesn't manually change their Contact Permissions at the same time.
Do you have an NCOA vendor to validate your mailing addresses? Tessitura has a great NCOA vendor - Zeta - that is very reasonable in price (IMHO). This helps limit the returns from invites.
And (again IMHO) Contact Point Purposes is a better choice to mark addresses as bad. It ties to the specific address and not the constituent like Contact Permissions. Using the Manage Contact Point Purposes utility you can select the list you want to use to update the specific addresses/address types.
Between these two should be able to limit the returns in the future.
Good luck.
I'm also wondering about bulk updating contact permissions. In our situation, not for bad addresses but for people who have said "don't contact me with this type of thing in this way" (e.g. don't solicit by phone).
As I currently understand, this has to be done in SSMS. However, there's no row entry if a person's specific contact point permission type is N/A (not asked). So you have to query the existence of the record (e.g. if it was ever set to "Yes" or "No"), then update where there is a result, or insert where there's not a result. Also factoring timestamps.
A utility would be more user friendly.
Thank you everyone! I really appreciate the suggestions! And thanks for steering me away from continuing to use contact permissions for bad addresses!
I had submitted an idea to the network for having a utility to update contact permissions, similar to the utility that updates contact point purposes. During telefunding/telemarketing pushes, some call centers inform our organizations of patrons who do not want to be called. In those cases, when it is a flat "do not contact me this way", it would be great to have a utility to update those in bulk, rather one at a time. Link to idea for a utility is below if you want to upvote it.
https://community.tessituranetwork.com/ideas/i/ideas/create-a-utility-to-update-contact-permissions-in-bulk
Best,
T.C.
Voted! Thanks for sharing your link.
Hi
There is a new Contact Permissions Utility provided to assist with v16 upgrade. It's designed to help organisations migrate to Contact Permissions which is mandatory for v16. It's in the Version Upgrade folder in Reports & Utilities, if you are on a high enough version of v15. It might work for other purposes, I haven't delved too deeply into it yet, but here is the link to documentation:https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Upgrade_v16_HS/Content/Contact%20Perm%20Migration/Contact%20Perm%20Migration%20Overview.htm
Best wishesDawn