Experience.FellowshipOne.com

There are four common types of addresses for our households:

Physical - The physical location of the house or apartment.

PO Box - The address where the post office will deliver mail when they do not deliver to a physical address.

Previous - The physical location of the previous house ( might be used if the house does not give a new address)

Statement - The address the individual or household requests for their Contribution statements.

Does anyone have a best practices for managing these in Fellowship and a description of how Fellowship uses these in reports, queries, and actions.

Dan,

We use our addresses a bit differently -  

• We enter the Primary address when we enter a new person.  They only have that address.  This includes PO Boxes, etc.  This is, in reality, the mailing address. We use it for our contribution statements, so we don’t use Statement address – it would be a duplicate of the Primary.

• When we receive something that tells us the person has changed his address, we change the current Primary address to Previous – then we add the new address information received to the new Primary address.  (Keeping the older address has been invaluable for us to find duplicate individuals and household members, especially for children in split homes and also for contributions)

• We use a Secondary address for several reasons 1- for a home address if they use a PO Box and we know their physical home address;  (this way we are sure the mailing will go to the PO Box , not the home address.)  2 -  for children living between two homes.  We use the comment area often to help us keep track of which is mother/father’s address or actual physical home location. We list the Secondary under the individual, not the household.

• We also have a Mail Returned/Incorrect address type.  We use this when mail is returned and (if the family is still attending) until we get a new address.  It keeps mail from being sent while we are researching.  If we change the family status to inactive, we leave it as Mail Returned so we know that that address not will be used.

As for the reports – most of the time the primary address is shown. A few reports allow you to see multiple, specific address types. You can also use a query to search on the different address types.  It will be interesting to see how everyone else uses their addresses.