lajackson wrote:The annual Christmas card mailing was used mostly to get updated addresses for missing members to keep the membership records located properly. Address validation by the Postal Service happened rarely.
I agree that such a mailing is a sound practice. A physical letter with postage is about the only way I know of that USPS will tell you if the party is not at that address. (There are database services intended for the mailing industry that can be interrogated for address-forwarding info, but they are way beyond the reach of a local unit.)
Another good technique that was practiced in a ward where I once clerked was that for new records received, if the families did not turn up immediately in meetings, we routinely mailed out a "welcome to the ward" letter over the bishop's signature, with an attractive enclosure that included a locator map to the meetinghouse, meeting times, and the contact numbers for key leaders. (One never knows when such a friendly reminder might help trigger an overdue visit.) Then we also got an early indicator of whether the family was really at that address. Sometimes records get shipped to wards based on old information, after the family has already moved. Once the forwarding address expires, for less-active families, it is very hard to find them.
In our ward today, the quorums are primarily responsible for any such early mailings. And in addition to quorum leaders, the bishopric tries to visit all new move-ins. The bigger challenge is with the cumulative backlog of unknowns. And situations fall fall through the cracks. When we first instituted lat/lon geocoding, it turned up a surprising number of families on our books who were outside our ward boundaries and mostly no one knew it.
Mass mailings at first-class rates, of course, are expensive relative to a typical ward budget. I suspect the annual Christmas mailing is the only whole-ward mailing for many units.
lajackson wrote:And the ward was over 100 miles north/south and 70 miles east/west. We usually just used zip codes as geo codes. [grin]
That sounds like it took in a lot of rural territory. My own urban/suburban ward today, which I think is about twice as large by household count as the average, spans 62 square miles. My previous ward 10 years ago, a mix of urban/suburban/country, was 250 square miles. I think these densities are not unusual for units outside the Mormon belt in Utah, Idaho etc.. The key variable is probably the ratio of LDS families to households in the general population. In Texas, the last I heard, that was about 1 percent. What is that figure in Wasatch Front wards -- 50-90 percent?
As for the feasibility of a clerk doing address maintenance by visual inspection, our ward boundaries now span 2,327 distinct street names, each with a range of valid addresses. No one carries that kind of detail in their heads.