We are a small non-profit org and I'm a new user to RE.  My question is how to other organizations keep their records up-to-date in regards to deceased constituents and\or divorced constituents?  Currently we are relying on word-of-mouth.  The person in this position before myself used to read the newspaper daily for deceased and divorced donors.  Any other ideas or would anyone like to share how their organization keeps these records up-to-date?

My organizations is Avow Hospice, so we do have to keep up with the deceased Constituents, we check regularly all Obits, in local newspaper are free, some companies have this as a service and they will charge you. Also, we check our clinical database, but sometimes there are not our patients so we have to check on the interenet for this.

 Divorces, a good idea is to give the opportunity to your donors to update their own records, on your next solicitation (remittance envelope) have space for them to write their address (if it has changed), how they want to be acknowledged, if there is a Mr. and Mrs., etc. I found that sometimes they do update their records and give us more info.........

 Other than that, RE offers a service to check your records for Deceased Constituents (I have never used it) - I did used the address validation and worked OK.

Hope this helps a bit :) 

Have any of you had people change how they want to be addressed from "Mr. James Smith and Mrs. Nancy Smith" to just "Ms. Nancy Smith" and you are still perplexed as to what happened - divorce, death, (or neither - just a preference change).  What do you do?

We have had this happen -- we update the addresee and salutation to whatever their preference is, and then make a Note saying exactly what info we got (ie, "reply form has 'Mr. and' crossed out, nothing written in").  We get these sometimes because a male and female listed on a check are not married, but a widowed senior and their child who has Power of Attorney.  Then, if someone has the opportunity to call them regarding something else, we know to ask if "John Smith" is a deceased spouse, or an ex, or a son, or whatever.