We are looking at purchase of Address Finder, Email Finder, with a 2x/year subscription to address finder for the NCOA updates for direct mail. Do you use address finder and find it easy to export and import data - ie. we want all spelled out when it is returned to us 123 North Common Street. We are also interested in one-time age finder and deceased record finder. Any of you out there find that valuable and worth the price? AddressAccelerator - we will be looking at a demo shortly. Is this something you have found useful for your data entry staff?? Thanks in advance for you input

We've used Address Finder, Email Finder and Address Accelerator with good results on all. For email finder, I think it's about a 20% true return. I believe all the updating with new results is done through the Data Health Center. After using Address Finder and updating our records, our returned mail cut down drastically. We weren't sending mail to bad addresses and we had some new good ones to use. We use Address Accelerator in two ways. We use F8 to validate any new addresses added to the database at the time we add them. Then I run Accelerator on the whole db any time we receive an update. That way we keep good looking addresses and have up to date county info in our db which is critical for us. We have our general business rule set to Not Abbreviate any Addresses. This can cause some label printing difficulties with too long addresses, but we opted for this choice as it felt more professional to us. When we made the decision to change all of our addresses, I used Address Accelerator after I changed the business rule. I set all old addresses to become abbreviated addresses. Then after I am assured I like the looks of the addresses, there is a utility available from BB to removed Abbreviated Addresses. I hope this helps. Nora Isaac Manager, Information Technology The ALS Association, Greater Phila. Chapter [Email Removed]

I have used AddressFinder and AddressAccelerator for years and like both products very much.  Once you get the hang of the NCOA process it is very easy and quick.  You have a lot of options like abbreviations/no abbreviations but I highly recommend using abbreviations per the USPS CASS certification. 

If you are going to demo AddressAccelerator its main function is to CASS certify your addresses so your address example will either change to 123 N Common St.  But you will need to convince the "powers that be" or whomever is making you spell everything out - that that is a very good thing.  The Post Office uses computers (not humans) to read addresses and using CASS certification insures proper and quick delivery (hence the name AddressAccelerator).  Addresses not in this format are run through the system 3 times and then kicked out and hand read which means they go in a stack of 1,000s of other envelopes to be hand read and lord only knows how long that can take.

I am not an expert in this but I believe you need to CASS certify your addresses to get postal bulk rates and I have heard that fairly soon you will be required to do it regardless.