Q: Do you struggle with inconsistant data?
Q: Can you find six different ways to spell road?
Q: Do your volunteers have trouble locating guests when they return?
Q: Are you struggling with duplicate accounts?
Chances are you have answered yes to at least one of these questions.
Finding your returning clients can sometimes be a real chore. When you ask a computer to find an address, it does so literally, it has to be an exact match. Meaning if you said find me John Doe who lives at 123 Peoria Road, it will look for that exact address and any variation will cause no results to show. So what happens? The volunteer creates a duplicate account.
FoodBank Manager standardizes the street address as it is saved to the database. An address entered before standardization can look like this: "123 w. Peoria Rd". Standardization will transform this address to this format: "123 W PEORIA RD". Every address is changed to meet the rules of the standardizer when saved to a guest record.
Rule Examples
- ROAD RD, Rd rd rD rd, rd. Rd. RD. Road road = will be changed to RD
- Street st st. st, STR Str = will be changed to ST
- Avenue Ave ave av. ave. ave, avenue = will be changed to AVE
- West w, w. WEST wst = will be changed to W