ZIP codes do more work in Altru than they get credit for. They drive visitor-origin reports for grant applications, decide who lands in a regional mailing, and let you tell a local family from a tourist. A constituent with no ZIP falls out of every one of those reports without anyone noticing. Finding them is a short query. Deciding which blanks actually matter takes a bit more thought.
Build the query
Start a new ad-hoc constituent query. You don’t need anything exotic. The core of it is a single filter on the address ZIP field.
- Pick the right address. In the address fields, use the primary address unless you have a reason not to. If you filter on all addresses, a constituent with a complete primary address and an old, incomplete secondary one will show up as “missing,” which is noise.
- Filter for blank ZIPs. Add the ZIP field from the primary address and set the filter to “is blank” (or the equivalent empty-value option your version shows).
- Add useful output columns. Name, lookup ID, constituent type, address line, city, state, country, email, phone, and date added. Date added is the one people skip and later wish they had, because it tells you where the gaps came from.
- Save it as a selection if you plan to use it in exports, mailings, or a recurring cleanup.
Run it once and look at the count before doing anything else. The raw number is almost always bigger than the real problem.
Split the results into groups that mean different things
A blank ZIP field covers several situations, and they don’t all need fixing.
No address at all
Many constituents created at admissions or through online ticket sales have a name and an email and nothing else. A blank ZIP here isn’t an error, it’s a missing address. Add a second filter (address line is blank, or the constituent has no primary address) so you can count these separately. Whether you chase them depends on whether you actually mail them.
Street address present, ZIP missing
This is the group worth cleaning. Someone typed “123 Elm St, Springfield” and stopped. These are usually fixable in a few minutes each with an address lookup, and they’re the records that will break a bulk mailing or get dropped from a geographic report.
International addresses
Filter on country. Plenty of countries use postal codes in a different format, and some addresses outside the US legitimately have none. Don’t “fix” these with a US ZIP. Leave them out of your cleanup list and out of any US-only geography report.
Inactive, deceased, and organization records
Exclude deceased and inactive constituents unless you have a reason to keep them. Organization records are worth a separate look, since a vendor or school without a ZIP matters more for group sales billing than for marketing.
Check for ZIPs that are present but wrong
While you’re in there, run a second pass for ZIPs that aren’t blank but aren’t usable either. The usual suspects:
- Four-digit ZIPs. Spreadsheets strip leading zeros, so a Massachusetts or New Jersey ZIP like 02139 comes back as 2139 after a round trip through Excel. If you’ve ever imported a list, check for these.
- Placeholder values like 00000, 99999, or 12345 that staff entered to get past a required field.
- Text in the field, such as “N/A,” “none,” or a city name.
Depending on what your query filters allow, you may be able to catch some of these with “begins with” or “contains” conditions. If the filters can’t express what you need, export the ZIP column and sort it in a spreadsheet, which takes about a minute and catches the rest.
Find out where the blanks come from
Sort the cleanup group by date added and look at the source. Patterns show up quickly:
- A cluster on one day usually means an import that didn’t map the ZIP column.
- A steady trickle tied to admissions usually means the desk is creating constituents quickly and skipping fields.
- Records from online purchases point at a web form that doesn’t ask for, or doesn’t require, a full address.
Fixing the source is worth more than any cleanup. If ZIP is all you need for visitor-origin reporting, asking for just a ZIP at the desk is a much easier sell to staff than asking for a full mailing address. Whether a given Altru web form can make an individual address field required is something to test in your form settings or confirm with Blackbaud support before you promise it to anyone.
Fixing the records
For a few dozen records, edit them one at a time and add the ZIP from an address lookup. For hundreds, export the list with lookup IDs, fill in ZIPs in a spreadsheet (format the column as text so leading zeros survive), and bring the corrections back through whatever update process your organization uses. Test that process on a handful of records first and confirm it updates the existing address instead of adding a new one.
Keep the saved query and rerun it monthly. Once the backlog is gone, a short monthly list is easy to clear, and a rising count is an early sign that a form or a desk process has drifted.
Duplicates hide in this list
One thing you’ll notice while working the cleanup group: a lot of address-less records are second copies of someone who already has a complete record, created when they bought a ticket online with a slightly different email or name spelling. Filling in a ZIP on the duplicate doesn’t help much. Merging it does. Social Good’s Deduper finds and fixes duplicate constituent and email records in Altru, which makes it a reasonable step to run before a large ZIP cleanup so you aren’t repairing records you’re about to merge.
