Hi Amanda,
We do not have a policy to prevent mailing to work addresses, but we definitely prefer a home address as the primary address. If there is no valid home address, we will use the work address and see what happens, because it is preferable to having no address at all. We also have staff that can perform research on records that have no valid address. Aside from our own employees, it is certainly difficult to maintain the accuracy of constituent employment and work addresses. If you know that the work addresses in your system are not likely to be accurate in general, you may want to look at why. Are you only adding the work address if the constituent provides it? In that case, there is not much you can do to track when people move to another job and the address becomes invalid. Are you adding work addresses every time you add employment, and the work address is simply the address of the employer? This scenario is problematic, as it may not be an accurate mailing address for the employee, and I could see where this could result in a large amount of returned mail.
You might consider adding a Do Not Mail flag to work addresses that don't come from the constituent themselves, and perhaps add the flag to constituent-provided addresses that reach a certain age (2+ years?) and then research them.
Just some thoughts that may or may not work for your situation. Mainly I'm wondering if the issue is just that they are work addresses, or if the issue is more the source of the address and it's inherent validity.
Kelli
Kelli Crispin
Business Analyst/Quality Assurance Specialist
she/they
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Office of University Development
208 W. Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27516
E kelli.crispin@unc.edu
CAMPAIGN.UNC.EDU