Part 2 - "same household" question....

[April K]

Sorry - I forgot one piece of info. Each stakeholder has
already been designated by "group type" - for example: US
Senator = USEN, Residential Property Owner = RPO, and so
on. Only RPO and a few other group types would fall into
what I am trying to do. Everyone else would still recieve
individual mailings...

~April

Here is my question:

I have a main table that contains the complete contact
information for each stakeholder. This includes: name,
address, city, state, zip, phone, etc... What I need to
find is an easy way of designating when more than one
person is from the same household or organization.

For instance Jeff Jones and Tom Smith might both reside at
1234 Lincoln Way, No Where, US 55555. Currently, they
would both be entered into the database as individual
records. This generally works well for large companys &
organziations when recieving separate letters, invites,
notices, but for a property owner of a residence or small
business, several pieces of the same mail can be very
annoying.

What I would like to do is find a way to designate them as
being in the same household so that when we send out a
newsletter or invite - only one is sent to the address,
but is addressed to all of the household members. Any
thoughts....

Thanks in advance for your help.

~April
..

 

[Dirk Goldgar]

Sorry - I forgot one piece of info. Each stakeholder has
already been designated by "group type" - for example: US
Senator = USEN, Residential Property Owner = RPO, and so
on. Only RPO and a few other group types would fall into
what I am trying to do. Everyone else would still recieve
individual mailings...

~April

Here is my question:

I have a main table that contains the complete contact
information for each stakeholder. This includes: name,
address, city, state, zip, phone, etc... What I need to
find is an easy way of designating when more than one
person is from the same household or organization.

For instance Jeff Jones and Tom Smith might both reside at
1234 Lincoln Way, No Where, US 55555. Currently, they
would both be entered into the database as individual
records. This generally works well for large companys &
organziations when recieving separate letters, invites,
notices, but for a property owner of a residence or small
business, several pieces of the same mail can be very
annoying.

What I would like to do is find a way to designate them as
being in the same household so that when we send out a
newsletter or invite - only one is sent to the address,
but is addressed to all of the household members. Any
thoughts....

Thanks in advance for your help.

As a general solution for this sort of problem, you need to revise your
table structure so that you have two tables, not one: a table of
StakeHolders (with all the information except the address fields) and a
table of Households (with the address fields). These tables would be
linked on the HouseholdID, potentially many StakeHolders to one
Household. You'd also need to redesign your forms to make it easy to
create a Household and assign it to various Stakeholders.

Then when you do your mailings, you would base them on queries that
return only a single record for each Household. These queries could use
a calculated field to return a list of the Stakeholders in each
household, or if your mailings are created as Access reports you could
use a subreport to list the Stakeholders.

 

[April K]

That would solve part of the problem, all of my
Residential Property Owners and small businesses would be
very happy! But how would I still get each US Senator or
State Assembly person individual copies???

~April

 

[Dirk Goldgar]

That would solve part of the problem, all of my
Residential Property Owners and small businesses would be
very happy! But how would I still get each US Senator or
State Assembly person individual copies???

One approach, of course, would be to simply assign each US Senator or
State Assemblyman to a separate household. However, I think the best
way would be to have two queries, one which would return mailing data
for only those stakeholders who should have one mailing per household,
and one which returns mailing data for those who should return one
mailing per stakeholder. The fields returned by each query would be the
same, but the first query would return only one record per household,
while the second returns one record per stakeholder -- both queries
having criteria on group type to include the appropriate stakeholders.

Then you could either do two separate mailings, one for each query, or
else use a union query to bring together the records from both queries,
and run your mailing off the union query.