Standardizing MLS Addresses

[RossEvans]

The annual Christmas card mailing was used mostly to get updated addresses for missing members to keep the membership records located properly. Address validation by the Postal Service happened rarely.

I agree that such a mailing is a sound practice. A physical letter with postage is about the only way I know of that USPS will tell you if the party is not at that address. (There are database services intended for the mailing industry that can be interrogated for address-forwarding info, but they are way beyond the reach of a local unit.)

Another good technique that was practiced in a ward where I once clerked was that for new records received, if the families did not turn up immediately in meetings, we routinely mailed out a "welcome to the ward" letter over the bishop's signature, with an attractive enclosure that included a locator map to the meetinghouse, meeting times, and the contact numbers for key leaders. (One never knows when such a friendly reminder might help trigger an overdue visit.) Then we also got an early indicator of whether the family was really at that address. Sometimes records get shipped to wards based on old information, after the family has already moved. Once the forwarding address expires, for less-active families, it is very hard to find them.

In our ward today, the quorums are primarily responsible for any such early mailings. And in addition to quorum leaders, the bishopric tries to visit all new move-ins. The bigger challenge is with the cumulative backlog of unknowns. And situations fall fall through the cracks. When we first instituted lat/lon geocoding, it turned up a surprising number of families on our books who were outside our ward boundaries and mostly no one knew it.

Mass mailings at first-class rates, of course, are expensive relative to a typical ward budget. I suspect the annual Christmas mailing is the only whole-ward mailing for many units.

And the ward was over 100 miles north/south and 70 miles east/west. We usually just used zip codes as geo codes. [grin]

That sounds like it took in a lot of rural territory. My own urban/suburban ward today, which I think is about twice as large by household count as the average, spans 62 square miles. My previous ward 10 years ago, a mix of urban/suburban/country, was 250 square miles. I think these densities are not unusual for units outside the Mormon belt in Utah, Idaho etc.. The key variable is probably the ratio of LDS families to households in the general population. In Texas, the last I heard, that was about 1 percent. What is that figure in Wasatch Front wards -- 50-90 percent?

As for the feasibility of a clerk doing address maintenance by visual inspection, our ward boundaries now span 2,327 distinct street names, each with a range of valid addresses. No one carries that kind of detail in their heads.

[RossEvans]

USPS standards require the address be in uppercase. That is why the USPS returns the address that way. I have followed the same formatting in MLS. That way it serves a s key for me to know if the address has been checked against the USPS database. If the address in MLS is in ALL CAPS then I know I have already checked it. If some or all of it is in lower case, then I can see at a glance which addresses need to be checked.

I can see how that would be useful to the clerk, but I think it ruins the list aesthetically for purposes of directories, MLS reports and even mailings. All-caps insult the eye, and a mixture of all-caps and title-case looks sloppy. Since we mail first-class, we don't have to address letters in all-caps to qualify for reduced rates. We just want to use the postal standards to get the addresses right. Who wants to get a Christmas card from the bishopric that looks like cheap junk mail?

While this would be an improvement, it shows that you still don't live in rural Oklahoma. A good chunk of our unit is in another county. When that county converted over to enhanced-911 service, they decided that eliminating rural routes and assigning street names and numbers would be too costly. Instead they simply went around to each address in the county with a GPS unit and geo-located it with latitude and longitude coordinates. Therefore, for this county, the standardized USPS address is still RR 1 BOX 12345. Unless one knows which rural routes are which, these addresses are imp[osible to find (unless one starts stalking the mail cariier while they are out making deliveries).

I undertand what you are saying. It is an extreme example of the generality I mentioned above: The goals of postal addressing and of geocoding sometimes diverge. In this case, MLS still has to capture, and we should validate, the RR 1 BOX 12345 address to get the ward's mail delivered correctly. Geocoding in this case likely needs to be handled by exception, perhaps manually, and stored in dedicated lat/lon fields

And you are right. No self-respecting Texan would want to live in Oklahoma

Maybe for your unit, you just need to break the task down into smaller chunks, Like one week to all the A's, the next week do all the B's, etc. Doing that it shouldn't take more than 6 months to clean up the addresses in your unit. That is definately doable.

I suspect we will end up doing that to get the less-serious postal errors corrected in the whole list, especially since Alan_Brown helped with his MLS lesson above. In the meantime, we are prioritizing the more serious errors, such as misspelled street names and non-existent addresses, that are identified as a byprodict of our geocoding scripts. See http://tech.lds.org/forum/showpost.php? ... stcount=49 (intial release) and http://tech.lds.org/forum/showpost.php? ... stcount=67 (latest release).

The involvement of our clerks to deal with errors is what distinguishes these scripts from most other geocoding and mapping solutions I have seen here, which usually run blind and plot maps without regard to missing members or members plotted at incorrect locations. I hope that church developers working on the new member-mapping app do something similar, and also involve the army of clerks to deal with exceptions in conjuction with automated processing, and capture the scrubbed and geocoded addresses in MLS.

But realistically, I don't think millions of addresses are going to get scrubbed without giving the clerks some power tools.

[lajackson]

USPS standards require the address be in uppercase.

I never did uppercase an address, so I guess when I said the changes were for proper formatting, I should have added, except that I did not use uppercase. Fortunately, the USPS has figured out that most folks don't like it, and I have found that their sorting machines read upper/lower pretty well.

But, strictly speaking, I guess this means that I have never had an address in MIS or MLS that was formatted properly to USPS standards.

They were, however, formatted 100% correctly to my standards, and the directories and reports looked cool because of it.

[Mikerowaved]

When MLS prints mailing labels, there is a checkbox allowing you to force the address to all caps, if you so desire. This implies to me that storing the address within MLS in mixed case is acceptable. (And I would add, probably the norm.)

Folks, I think the point has been clearly made. There is currently no easy path to clean up addresses in MLS, other than someone digging in and doing it by hand, especially if prior clerks have not been particularly careful in the past regarding addressing. Without question, some Wards will be harder to clean up than others. (That's probably true about most things.) Is it required of the existing clerk(s) to "sanitize" their unit's address list in MLS? There's no direct commandment that I know of, however, I think we all can see the blessings that can come from putting chaos into order. Aside from the obvious advantages, you will also make a friend out of the person who will follow next in your calling.

Mike

[kmalone-p40]

I don't quite understand what you are suggesting. What does "run the database in Access" mean? As far as I know, you can't connect to the MLS database using Microsoft Access, and even if you could, it would be a very bad idea because of the risk of damaging the database.

Or are you talking about exporting the data from MLS as a CSV file and running some analysis on that data? If so, it seems like a spreadsheet would be a simpler choice than Access, but you're welcome to use any tool you want, as long as you have a legal license and preserve the security of the exported MLS data.

But in any case, for your suggestion to help anyone, I think it would be good for you to clarify, perhaps listing some specific steps.

I was suggesting simply running the csv file in MS Access to create a report that I identifies errors, I am not advocating using MLS to maintain the database. I am also no advocating that a ward purchase MS Access, funds are better spent elsewhere.

I export my file to flash drive and then dump to my home PC, link through Access and run it within 2 minutes I see the errors. I can do this weekly as records come in and I catch them right then go back next Sunday and make the correction.

Its lengthy in time but I have know desire to place church records at risk for he most part I only care about the addresses anyways. Which is what I export.

[jbh001]

I can see how that would be useful to the clerk, but I think it ruins the list aesthetically for purposes of directories, MLS reports and even mailings. All-caps insult the eye, and a mixture of all-caps and title-case looks sloppy. Since we mail first-class, we don't have to address letters in all-caps to qualify for reduced rates. We just want to use the postal standards to get the addresses right. Who wants to get a Christmas card from the bishopric that looks like cheap junk mail?

Point taken. Aesthetics are, however, a matter of taste, and I find no such visual insults of mixing case. My last employer was quite satisfied with the look of its last three annual Christmas card mailings with sample addresses formatted in mixed case like so:

John Doe
123 SESAME ST
SOMEWHERE NY 12345

To each his own.

[RossEvans]

@jbh001,

I won't argue aesthetics too far, but in any event I think the more common practice is that most units prefer not to use all-caps. I think the optimum behavior for a validation form, integrated into MLS, would be to validate the address immediately, along with any warnings, and return a standardized result converted at the least to initial caps. (Not perfect for all proper names but probably good enough) A batch process could also do the same by default. The most important thing is to make sure the address is valid and streets are spelled and abbreviated correctly.

Absent such a function in MLS, it would be possible to write an interactive helper app for cut-and-paste with simiilar functionality, for units with Internet access. One could write that on an authorized basis with a USPS applicaton ID. Or if someone were tempted, one could hack the client-side javascript of http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/welcome.jsp without an ID. I prefer not to go that route, and am protected from such temptation anyway because my javascript skills are not that great.

[aebrown]

Point taken. Aesthetics are, however, a matter of taste, and I find no such visual insults of mixing case. My last employer was quite satisfied with the look of its last three annual Christmas card mailings with sample addresses formatted in mixed case like so:

John Doe
123 SESAME ST
SOMEWHERE NY 12345

To each his own.

It's not just a matter of aesthetics. Mixed case addresses also take a lot less room in printed reports. This can make a big difference when you are printing reports directly from MLS (especially when your report has several columns), and when you use exported data to create printed directories. Mixed case saves toner and paper, and improves readability over uppercase (that last point is not just aesthetics, but established scientific fact).

It's trivial to convert mixed case to uppercase, if you want to use the information in some actual mailing, especially since the MLS "Print Mailing Labels" feature has a checkbox for that purpose. But addresses are used at least ten times as often in applications that don't involve mailing at all. Trying to go from all uppercase back to mixed case is not nearly so easy -- it is verily impossible if you want to print directly from MLS, since no such feature is supplied.

[jfackerson]

We've been using on-line USPS site for years to authenticate and to format. Problem with upper casing is that it really degrades address display within Membership Directory on LUWS, as well as on some MLS output. Proportional fonts always assign more horizontal space to capital letters than to those in lower case.

In hopes of someday receiving access to a GIS keyed to existing unique 12 digit Zip Codes, I added them, including check digit for most every family within ward. With unique zip codes, families could eventually be plotted on a GIS generated map.

[RossEvans]

In hopes of someday receiving access to a GIS keyed to existing unique 12 digit Zip Codes, I added them, including check digit for most every family within ward. With unique zip codes, families could eventually be plotted on a GIS generated map.

I think the lingua franca of GIS systems is latitude/longitude, which is more precise and general. So the goal there is street-address geocoding to lat/lon, and standardizing the street addresses is a huge step toward that goal.

I am still intrigued by the "12-digit Zip Code" concept. Where are you getting that data for your addresses?