Schedule and run the AddressFinder (NCOA) service

Warning: The address listed for your organization under Management, My Organization must be a street address in order to run the AddressFinder (NCOA) service. The service will not run if your organization's address is a PO box.

This procedure is for eTapestry clients in the United States only. Only users with admin rights can run the AddressFinder (NCOA) service. Foreign address are not updated by this process. If you track multiple constituents with a single account, the joint account may not be updated by this process. If an account uses a nickname that differs from the constituent's name in the NCOA database, the address is not updated.

Video: Watch a video about the AddressFinder service.

  1. From Management, click AddressFinder (NCOA).

    Note: AddressFinder™ requires information about your Organization account in order to schedule the service . If you are missing information required for the service to run, a message appears prompting you to update information in these required fields. These changes will be saved to your Organization account.

  2. Under Run a new AddressFinder (NCOA) service, select a query category.

  3. Select a query.

  4. Enter a date to start the process.

  5. Select whether to update all personas or just the primary persona.

    Warning: If you use personas to track information about an account's relations, then you may not want to update all personas. For example, if you have an account for a college student, but you use a persona on that account to track the parents, then you probably do not want to automatically update the address for the parent persona. We recommend you use relationship types, rather than personas, to track related individuals and organizations.

  6. Select whether to reformat all address data processed by NCOA or only addresses that are changed. Addresses are reformatted to meet USPS standards. For more information about standardizing addresses, refer to the Experian Data Quality website.

  7. Enter information about the contact person at your organization who should receive a summary email when the service is complete.

  8. Enter your organization's North American Industry Classification System (NCAIS) code in the NCAIS Code field. For more information about NCAIS codes, you can visit the NAICS Lookup Help site.

  9. You can give permission to run your data through the AddressFinder (NCOA) service from eTapestry. Previously, in order to utilize the service, your organization would need to complete the Process Acknowledgment Form (PAF) and submit it to Blackbaud.

  10. To save the schedule and run it on the designated date, click Schedule.

    • When the process is complete, the email recipients receive a summary email with a PDF file attachment.

      Note: You cannot edit or modify PDF files that have been generated by eTapestry.

      eTapestry also creates a journal note for your organization's account that includes the same PDF file.

      Note: To help quality for postal discounts and to avoid extra fees, provide the PDF—which proves that you processed AddressFinder (NCOA) within the past 90 day—to the United States Postal Service with your mailings.

    • If a constituent’s address was standardized, or if the person's address was updated due to a move, then eTapestry creates a journal note for the constituent. Use the notes to see a history of the constituent's addresses. The status of the persona's address is also overwritten to show the current status.

    • Additionally, a query category called "AddressFinder (NCOA) Codes" is created. Within the category, queries for each value of codes for user-defined fields are created. The fields indicate that a persona's address was updated, standardized, or marked invalid.

      Tip: We recommend you use the queries to locate personas whose addresses have become invalid or who have moved without providing a forwarding address. If you have other methods of reaching the constituents, contact them to request updated addresses.

  11. If you use a user-defined field called "Mailing status" to track which constituents have bad addresses, we recommend you run mass updates after each AddressFinder (NCOA) run. For details, refer to Clear "Bad Address" user-defined fields and Mark "Bad Address" user-defined fields.

Note: To edit schedule information, return to this page and click Edit. To prevent the schedule from running the service, you can also return to this page and click Cancel.