I had a question that I wanted to ask anyone who works with alumni on a regular basis. My primary problem as an Alumni Coordinator with a small private school is locating past students who don't have a valid email address in Raiser's Edge. I use whitepages.com to help locate them but sometimes there's a problem with very common names such as"Mary Smith". I don't really know who it is because they could have movedto a different state etc.Since we are non-profit, there is a limited amount of money that is available in the budget. So, if anyone can give me some much needed advice it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

We use alumnifinder.com it is only 25 cents per record FOUND, and we only use it when we have the ssn of an alum. I think our monthly usage is between 6 and 10 dollars (and that's a busy month, usually during phonathon). Another approach to take is to send a "have you seen these people list" email to alums with a valid address. We did that and one alum wrote back with the email addresses of about 25 of his classmates. We added the email addresses that he provided as phone type "email". We then sent an email to each of the people that he had given us an address for and asked them if they wanted to be listed in the email directory - if they said yes, then we changed the email from "email" to "Email Web Directory" Good luck. Elaine Tucker [Email Removed] Texas Lutheran University

If you can find a way to fund Alumnifinder, it is a great resource. You can search by name, social security #, address, business. It will supply you with past addresses, birthdates, so you can narrow the search that way when searching for a common name. I also use Searchbug.com, it is free, unless you get specific. It is according to the white & yellow pages, but, I find it very helful.
Beth
FPC

Thanks for the suggestions. I've given the suggestion to my boss, but I think the only problem is that we have so many lost records, over 2,000 people that need to be found that it might become extremely expensive to say the least but I'll continue tothink up ways to find people. Also, searchbug.com is similar to whitepages.com except it has a few better features to use.

If you have too many records to do individual searches, you might want to look into having this done first by batch. HEP does it (http://www.hepdevelopment.com ), and forum users could probably recommend other places that also do this. AlumniFinder does address lookup by batch, but we had a terrible experience with them in this area this past spring, and I would never recommend them (if you want to know more, contact me off-list). We have used AlumniFinder for individual searches for years, and still use them for that, but we are currently looking into other services - including BB's PeopleFinder and PhoneFinder. Catherine Catherine Seebald Director of Advancement Services Houghton College One Willard Ave. Houghton, NY 14744 585-567-9395 [Email Removed]