I concur with all of the posts regarding the exporting of the preferred mailing address. We have a similar process and scrubbing data is a huge waste of staff time. I would love to see a preferred address feature applied to the email fields as well. If you can make this process work for exporting how will it translate for integrations with SSO.

Good to see you are working on this one!

We were just about to go down the custom filed path and were dreading the perpetual Excel manipulation that was going to be needed every time we wanted to mail things. Here are some items for the wish list to make this a functional feature in the real world:

• Be able to pull data after a search in the Directory /CRM Report the data in one list.

• Only output data pertinent to mailing, we don't need passwords and join dates in the exported data. Or let us choose what data to export and save our preferences.

• Sate abbreviations not the full State spelled out.

• Show the members choice in an export

 Thanks for listening to your users!

When I've worked in other systems, the preferred address was a drop box to select either professional or personal address, then there were separate fields in the data file for the merge fields (preferred address1, preferred address2, Preferred city, preferred state, preferred postal code, preferred country) that were auto populated based on the drop box selection. Then you just set up all of your reports, invoices, etc with the merge fields using preferred address fields.

Yes! We want our members to have the ability to list both their home and professional information but choose which one is their preferred address. Preferred address for us is used for all mailings and listing in our publication.

I agree with both Liz and Michael. Both aspects should be implemented to ease member communication and form functionality.

I would echo the suggestion for state abbreviations so that reports come out in a format that the USPS prefers. I will up the ante here since we are dealing with Addresses to request a flag for BAD ADDRESS similar to Bounced Email so I don't waste postage on a mailing. We currently use a custom field for this but it doesn't FLAG the account, red at top of account page, like a Suspended account or Bounced Email, which would help us collect updated information at events. If you can have the zip code populate the state field that would the icing on the cake. My associations are all tech people and they get very honked off that the system doesn't do this because "the programing is SO easy"

Hi Brian and Chelsea:

Having a preferred address selector wouldn't be much different than creating a custom field "preferred address". The core issue here is the fact that YM uses a flat file database, and any export requires manual sorting with or without a preferred address. The solution lies with YM moving to a relational membership database, whereby the preferred address could be selected by the admin when they're running the mailing report. Then the export would only contain the preferred address selected by the member. Using a Custom Query here is only a workaround because of a number of variables in play.

There are a myriad of other reporting deficiencies that would be solved with a relational database. If you were to look at a product such as CiviCRM or ISIS, you would see the difference in how these function compared to YM. Currently everything in YM has to be performed manually because fields can't trigger logic (yes/no) resulting in the display a specific queries (preferred address).

Thanks

Hi Mark,

You are correct in that just giving the member a way to select their "preferred" address is only half of the issue. We are also planning to add an easy way to the Custom Report feature to select the "Preferred" address fields.

Our database is a relational DB. In building the reporting module the intent was to remove any steps needed by a site administrator to link tables together and to know how that has to work so we built Views that contained all of the information needed. Some of these Views are dated and some restrict access to data and this was not intentional.

I am working on a top 5 list of improvements that we can do to the reporting feature and would be glad to have a discovery call with you so I can get your ideas.

Thanks Mark.

I am in support and agreement with all the stated benefits previously posted. Please make this happen. THX

Is there any progress at all in this area? We are only a month into using YM and are hitting a real roadblock here. We had assumed we'd be able to choose a "Preferred address" to export for mail merge. There seems to be absolutely no way to do so. I'd love to hear some more examples of what others are doing. I'm dumbfounded at how email-oriented YM is - we have many, many members who will always prefer a snail-mail letter for some things.