YSA and Multiple Stake Boundaries

[justinpinkham]

Having been a YSA Clerk (non student area), a Home Ward Clerk and now a 2nd Counselor my experience has been as follows. 1st I need to preference that our YSA ward covers 5 Utah stakes, approx 375 "households" in Eagle Mountain UT. I say approximately due to turnover. We regularly read in anywhere between 5 and 10 names a week, we often reorganize our EQ and RS ministering assignments up to 3 times a year due to this. We have in the past also instituted a "finding" time 2x a month with our ward counsel and members of local home ward and stake leaders in addition to our welcoming and missionary efforts. I've spent weeks researching ways to aid our visits, record our progress, and break down local Stake boundaries I have worked with local YSA Stake Clerks, and together have not found resources that help us here. My YSA ward typically focuses on 1 stake a month and go pound doors with any leaders of the home stake and our ward council. The following month we would coordinate times with another stake, rinse and repeat.

I ended up creating an excel spreadsheet, import the household records for the YSA ward, on a second sheet, use "unique Street names or numbers" for each stake in a separate column create a formula that would search the address for each record and "match" the appropriate column of "unique street names" on the separate sheet. I would then update the "import" records, the match formula would update and I could easily "filter" records based on the local home stake. This worked great for a time.
Issues came because of city growth, now I am in the process of again researching a way to update this method because of city growth, google maps (which is what I used to find street names) cannot keep up with the streets, and housing that is being added, about a 6mo to 1 year leeway, yet local stake and ward boundaries change almost every 2 years. I believe with the process the church has for re-aligning wards and stakes there is potential for these resources to aid YSA wards and local Stakes overcome these challenges but I haven't been able to reach the right people.
This a really, really long post but a huge frustration for coordinating efforts with YSA ward and local home Wards and Stakes.

[sbradshaw]

What's your goal, with the spreadsheet? Is it just to keep track of which home stake a given ward member belongs to?