Process National Change of Address

The National Change of Address (NCOA) list is a database that the United States Postal Service maintains to reroute your mail to a new address when you move. In other words, it’s a big list of official address changes.

What does that mean for your organization? As you’ve probably experienced, people aren’t always very diligent about letting you know when they move. Even if you notice someone has been absent, it could be that they’re on vacation or have had a change to their work schedule.

Whatever the circumstances may be, as a Rock admin you want to ensure your data is clean and up to date. The NCOA service helps you do that by comparing addresses in your system with their list of address changes.

NCOA Processing

To get your addresses updated and formatted you'll need to go to Tools > Data Integrity > NCOA. If this is your first time there won’t be any data there, but either way you’ll need to click the Process NCOA button near the top-right.

You’ll arrive at the page pictured below. This is where you create a file of people and addresses to send to NCOA. This is also where you’ll upload the results of NCOA’s processing back into Rock, which we'll see later.

1. TrueNCOA Registration - Click this link to sign up with TrueNCOAif you haven’t already. This step is required before you proceed.
2. Step 1: NCOA Export Tool - You’ll need to have a Data View that returns people in-hand before you can complete the first step. Once you’ve selected your data view, simply click Export File at the bottom of the panel. This will generate a file containing the people in your Data View.
3. NCOA Results Uploader - This is where you’ll upload the processed file from TrueNCOA. We’ll circle back to this at the end.

After you’ve selected a Data View and clicked Export File, you’ll see a message at the bottom of the screen with a link to TrueNCOA, where the process will continue.

If you’re curious, the file Rock produces contains the columns listed below. You don’t need to know this, but it is what you should expect to see if you open the file.

1. PersonId
2. PersonAliasId
3. FamilyId
4. LocationId
5. FirstName
6. LastName
7. Address Line 1
8. Address Line 2
9. City
10. State
11. PostalCode
12. Country

Once you’re in TrueNCOA, you’ll need to upload the file that you just downloaded from Rock. TrueNCOA gives you options for how to upload the data and shows previous files if any exist.

When the file upload completes, you’ll see a preview of the data that will be processed. Click the Continue button to proceed. Your next step will be to set the mapping. This takes the fields from Rock and maps them to corresponding fields in TrueNCOA where applicable. If there isn’t a direct equivalent, select Pass-Through as pictured below.

When the mapping is completed, you’ll proceed to the next page to confirm everything looks good, or to go back and make corrections if needed. Once you’ve confirmed you’re ready, click the Continue button near the top of the page to proceed.

The processing of the file may take a little while, especially if the file contains many thousands of records. You may need to wait several minutes for completion. Once it’s done, you’ll see a page like the one pictured below. This is where you’ll click the Export button to start the process of getting your results out of NCOA to load back into Rock.

Click Export, then click Purchase & Download when that option appears. You may be asked to confirm that you’re certain you want to proceed. The export process can take several minutes, especially with larger files, so don’t be surprised if you have to wait.

When the export is finished, you’ll see a button to Download the file. If the download doesn’t start or you don’t see that button, click the Home icon in the top-left corner, where you can see your list of files, including the one that was just exported. Click the file name under Export Files then click the Download button pictured below.

Next, you’ll take that file and import it into Rock, from the same NCOA Processing page we saw earlier. Upload the file from TrueNCOA as part of the “Step 2” process. You have some options to work with, but they’re pretty intuitive and you can use the blue info icons to clarify their purpose if needed.

After the file has been processed you can look at the results from the Tools > Data Integrity > NCOA page where we started. This page will list every family whose address was checked, so it can get very long very quickly. Be sure to use the Filter Options to narrow the list to only the records you want to see.