GeoCode can be anything you want so it *could* be use to "uniquely identify houses/apartments". Since the GeoCode can be 8 characters long, with each character a letter or a number, that gives you 36**8 possible combinations. You could assign a unique geocode to every member of the church almost 200,000 times.n8elgr8 wrote:...Also you wouldn't want to group on geocode alone since that does not uniquely identify houses/apartments.rontilby wrote:The MLS software has a GeoCode feature that will allow you to group your members geographically.
Of course, you might want your GeoCode to have a little sense to it. You can see http://tech.lds.org/wiki/Geocode for examples of patterns to use, but you can obviously come up with your own.
RossEvans wrote:There are lots of ways to group by address if you export the data. One inherent weakness is that MLS and related online systems is that our address data tends to be dirty. There is no address standardization, and clerks may enter the same address differently on different records. This can be mitigated but probably not eliminated through discipline.
That's definitely an issue especially if you have frequent turnover with your ward clerks but dirty data can certainly be eliminated, not just mitigated. But as you noted, it takes discipline (and a little time). I've only been our ward clerk for 4 months but it only took me a couple hours to clean up our data. I had exported the data so that I could create a ward directory (before I started printing them via the online directory options) and I would do global search and replace in my word document. Some addresses didn't match my pattern so I'd fix them. I wanted my directory to fit on one side of the paper so I would change things like 'Road' to Rd. If there was a 'road' or 'ROAD', then they would stick out as exceptions to my replacements and I'd fix their data.
I'd do the same with town names and even the state. Sometimes I'd have 'North Carolina' and sometimes it would be 'north carolina' or 'nc' or 'NC'. I actually remove the state name from the directory since our ward doesn't go across a state boundary.
Same with phone numbers. I wanted the phones to look consistent (ok, maybe I'm a little OCD), using dashes between the groups of numbers instead of parens around the area code. Since most of our members have local phone numbers, I remove the area code for them but leave the ones with long distance cell phone numbers, which is probably the norm for student wards - lots of out of town area codes. Doing that kind of replacement also showed the records that were dirty.
Anyway, I think this horse is long beaten dead by now but the main point is you can clean up the data fairly easily. As new records come in, you'd have to look at them to see if they fit your pattern.
I could send the list of things I changed in the exported data to make my directory if anyone was interested. It's not that exciting but might give you a way to clean up your data.
Now, with all that said, I agree with the original point of this thread that having something built-in that *also* filters up to lds.org would be nice.
