A visitor from Osaka buys a membership for a relative in the States, and their own address lands in Altru with a blank state field and “Osaka” crammed into the city line. Multiply that by every international guest, donor, and member, and your address data slowly becomes hard to query, hard to mail to, and hard to clean up.
Altru ships with state lists for some countries, but not every country you’ll see in your constituent records comes with its regions filled in. Altru doesn’t fill those lists in on its own. An administrator has to add them. Below is how to decide which countries are worth the effort, where the values should come from, and what to check before and after you add them.
Start with the countries you actually have
Before you add anything, find out which countries matter. Build a constituent query on primary address that outputs country, state, and city, and filter to everything that isn’t your home country. Group or sort by country. You’ll usually find that a handful of countries account for nearly all of your international addresses: often Canada, the UK, Mexico, Australia, Germany, Japan, or wherever your organization has tour, school, or sister-institution ties.
That list is your work order. There’s no need to load regions for every country in the world. Add them where you have real records, and where a state or province helps with mailing or reporting.
Where state and province values live in Altru
Countries and their states are maintained as configuration data in Altru’s administration area, alongside other code tables. In most databases, someone with administrator rights can open a country and add its states or provinces, each with a description and an abbreviation. Security rights decide who can see this area, so if you can’t find it, ask whoever manages your Altru security roles.
Two things are worth confirming before you start, because they vary and are easy to get wrong:
- Whether a country is already set up with an address format. Some countries have formatting rules that control which address fields show and in what order. Adding states to a country doesn’t necessarily change how its addresses print or display.
- Whether bulk loading is available to you. We aren’t aware of a supported way to import a full state list in one step for every Altru database. If you’re facing dozens of entries, ask Blackbaud support whether an import or a service-assisted load is an option before you type them one at a time.
If you have a sandbox or test environment, add one country there first and look at how it behaves on a constituent record, in a query, and on a web form.
Use a published standard, not memory
The fastest way to create messy data is to have three staff members make up abbreviations. Pick one source and stick to it. ISO 3166-2 is the international standard that lists the official subdivisions of each country, and it’s a sensible default when you aren’t sure.
Some quick reference points:
- Canada: 10 provinces and 3 territories, with two-letter postal abbreviations (ON, QC, BC, AB, and so on) that Canada Post uses. Use those.
- Australia: 6 states and 2 territories, commonly abbreviated NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, WA, TAS, ACT, and NT.
- Mexico: 31 states plus Mexico City. Abbreviations vary by source, so ISO codes are the safest choice.
- United Kingdom: Royal Mail doesn’t require a county for delivery. Many organizations skip the state field for UK addresses entirely rather than maintain a county list.
Japan’s prefectures
Japan is a common sticking point because there’s no widely used set of two- or three-letter prefecture abbreviations the way there is for US states. Japan has 47 prefectures. ISO 3166-2 assigns them numeric codes from JP-01 (Hokkaido) through JP-47 (Okinawa), ordered roughly north to south.
For a constituent database, those numeric codes are hard for staff to read. A practical approach is to enter the romanized prefecture name as the description (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hokkaido, Fukuoka, and so on) and decide deliberately what goes in the abbreviation field: either the ISO code or the name itself. Whichever you choose, write it down. Japanese addresses on mail usually show the full prefecture name, so if your mailings print the abbreviation, test a sample label before you settle on codes.
Clean up the records you already have
Adding states only fixes new entries. Your existing international addresses probably have the region typed into the city line, the address block, or nowhere at all. Rerun your country query after the new values are in place and work through it:
- Export the list of international addresses with blank or free-text states.
- Match each one to the right new state value. A spreadsheet lookup against your chosen standard speeds this up.
- Update the records, either by hand for small numbers or through whatever batch or import process your team normally uses for address updates.
- Remove the region from the city or street lines where it was used as a workaround, so it doesn’t print twice.
Check the places addresses come in
Once the values exist, follow an international address through every entry point you use: front desk sales, membership processing, donation entry, and your online forms. Confirm that the state drop-down changes when a guest picks a different country, and that the value saved to the record is the one you expect. If an entry point still shows only US states, note it and raise it with Blackbaud support rather than training staff to work around it.
Quick answers
Do I need states for every country?
No. Add them for countries that show up in your data and where a region is part of a normal mailing address.
Will adding states change existing addresses?
No. Existing records keep whatever they have until you update them.
What if staff typed a region before the list existed?
Query for international addresses with a blank state, then fix them in a batch once the new values are available.
