Managing Addresses in Virtuous

One of the important pieces of data you're probably collecting from your donors is their address so that you can send them communications that help them remain connected to your organization. Keeping these addresses organized and usable is incredibly important to your overall data health. We're going to dive into how to make sure you're keeping your data accurate and usable in this article.

Where do Addresses Live?

Addresses always live at the contact level. This is most easily explained by looking at a household contact record. While there may be four individuals in the household who volunteer or attend events, they all share the same address.

Adding Addresses

If you get a new address for a donor you can go in on the contact record and add a new address by clicking the + sign in the Addresses box. 

You have several things to consider when adding an address:

• Address Label - This is a queryable field that can help you identify different addresses such as Home or Work.
• Dates at this Address - These dates are used to determine what the current address is for the contact record. This is a merge field for mailed receipts and an exportable field.
• Set this contact address as primary - This will make the new address a primary address for the contact record which is the default address used.

You can also add new addresses via the gift and contact import tool or the bulk data tools. If you're using a CSV import, be sure to check out the in-app guides for instructions. When a new address is added in the import tool, those contacts will be added to the Update Needed tab where you will be prompted to decide how you want to handle the new address.

Things to Consider

There are always going to be some exceptions to every rule, so here are some things to consider when working with addresses:

• The Data Health tool has a tab to help you identify "bad" addresses. Be sure to check that out before putting together a mailing list.
• If you're keeping old addresses, like when a donor has moved and you want a history of their address, you will need to be very careful when running any queries based on address. For example,  if you want to get a list of all donors living in a particular state you would use "Primary Address" is "True" AND "State" is ____; otherwise the query will return any contact that has that state on any of its addresses.
• Due to address living at the contact level, if you have households that are split amongst contact records for giving reasons, you may want to consider adding a tag to indicate that one of the contacts has a duplicate address so that you can exclude those contacts in your mailing list.
• If you have contacts with seasonal addresses, make sure you're using Current Address for your merge tags in receipting.