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Author:
Kristenson,
Joel
Last
Updated: 2019-09-12
Overview
This article provides a
quick walk-through on ‘normalizing’
addresses in your database so that slight
misspellings are cleaned up en
masse. Databases can get messy from
time-to-time especially if there is a lot of activity taking place –
instead of going one-by-one to clean up your address records, this
article shows how to fix it with a mass
update.
Scenario:
as users enter
data into the system or people come into your database through
an online
donation or event
sign-up it’s possible that one of
the address fields was entered slightly wrong e.g. city. This
will cause the drop-downs in the database to contain inconsistent
data. The example below shows the city
Minneapolis spelt three different ways when
only one of the ways is correct:
Tip:
After you
clean-up the misspelled data in your drop-downs, you further cleanup
your database by conforming
addresses en masse as well
as merging
duplicate address
data.
Steps
Open the
Addresses list.
Run a search
query by the
misspelled address field i.e. City, State,
Country, Street, Zipcode, etc. In my example I
searched for the city “Minneapol” which should be Minneapolis which
produced 10 results.
Tip:
if you put quotes
“” around the word it will only return
exact matches which in this example was
important.
Click the
Edit drop-down at the top of the screen and
select Set
Fields….
Scroll down to the
field in the list that is
misspelled. Enter the correct
spelling and click [OK].
In my example it was the City
field.
Double-check that
everything is correct and click
[OK].
You’ll get a prompt when
the process is finished. Click
[OK] to
proceed.
Run another search in the
Address list by the same
misspelled field (using quotes around it) and the results
should equal zero. My
example is below.
Repeat
these steps until
all the misspellings have been
corrected.
Once you’re finished you’ll
need to refresh the values in the drop-down menus. Navigate
to Application Menu > System Manager >
Settings > Update Unique Search Values (Drop
Downs) and click
[OK].
If you have a large
database and/or you haven’t done this in a while it may take 15+ minutes
for the process to complete.
Click
[OK] once the process is
finished.
Navigate back to the
Contacts (Voters/Donors) list and
verify that your
drop-downs are cleaned up (if
it’s not a field that’s a drop-down you can verify
by formatting
the
column into the grid). In
my example the 2 misspelled cities for ‘Minneapolis’ have been cleaned
and now the correctly spelled one is all that
remains.
The related
resources below link to a wide variety of other useful
articles and videos related to cleaning up
your database.
Related
Resources
Article:
Automatically
Conform Addresses
Article:
Auto-Merging
Duplicate Address Records
Article:
Unable
to Make A Change to an Address
Article:
Refreshing
your Address Records with Political Jurisdiction Data i.e. CD, SD, LD…
(Only Applies to Customers who Live in a State we Provide Updated Voter
Data For)
Article:
Address
Normalization (unlimited addresses per
person)
Article:
Address
Management
Article:
How
to ‘Manually Merge’ Duplicate Contact Records with
Drag-and-Drop
Article:
How
to Find Duplicate Contact Records by Identical *Primary* Email Address,
and Automatically Merge them Together
Article:
Find
Possible Duplicates
Article:
How
to Print Mail-Merge Address Labels
Article:
Printing
Envelopes
Article:
Rollback
– Undo Function – Also, Tips on Viewing the Activity for Changes to a
Specific Field (Requires Admin Access)
Video:
Updating or
Changing Data in a Field for all or Some of Your
Records
Video:
Households –
What To Do B4 Householding!!
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