Completely agree! Why is it that--if RE is supposedly a global enterprise system, it's functionality for maintaining international addresses is so lacking? Why are we still stuck with having to make every country's postal element arrangement conform to either US, Canada, UK, Australia, or New Zealand's system? Also, it would appear that Blackbaud could stand to make additional revenue by having an foreign address verification add-on similar to AddressFinder but for international addresses. We're often spending excessive time in just trying to verify some addresses we get using a variety of internet tools. C'mon, it's 2012 and business is so much more global now--let's get this done!

Additionally we all need to set up the countries the same way - why have all the users do this time consuming work why not just have databases updated by Blackbaud with new address format as they change and updated via patches? Would be nice if it was just included in our maintenance fee instead of an add on.

What does it take to get BlackBaud to review and respond to these suggestions? This idea is on the first page of this site, #18, and hasn't even received acknowledgement in 4 months? What is the point of this site?

I am so eternally confused. This functionality does exist in some ways - you do have the ablity to set up the address format and fields per country. The only thing it can not do is have separate tables per country which I agree would be nice but I am not sure is high on my priority list.

This is high on my list. We have many international constituents, Asian addresses and we are about to integrate with Education Edge. There are no country choices that work well with Asian addresses especially in Education Edge - they don't have the same flexibility that we have. Also we can not add many "states" to the states field because the short abreviation is already being used by another country. For instance Austraila has NT and WA - NT is already in use by Canada and WA by the US. Finding more and more issues like this. Some countries have state codes with more than three digits which RE can not handle. I'd like to be able to use the fields for what they are intended so I can preserve our data integrity. International mail is expensive and we would like it to get to our constituents. Thanks to all who have signed on.

I think that their needs to be separate state tables for each country. We also have problems with foreign country states having the same abbreviation as US states. So our WA states for Australia always want to come across as Washington not Western Australia. Plus, I've also noticed that our extremely long state table messes with what constituents see in Net Community. When a majority of our constituents live in the US and select United States as their country on the online form, they should only see US states, not states from other foreign countries. If so many other online forms and software programs are able to implement the feature where the state table is dependent on the Country selected, I think Raiser's Edge should be able to implement it too.

It would seem that since the address format is an "exacting process" requiring specific individual management, oversight, and manual entry, it is recommended that BB "keep it simple". Have two (2) fields. One field provides ALL International Address itemized verbiage in Alpha order. The other field provides the Country of specific interest in Alpha Order and in Field order. Meanwhile, I have over 1000 Alumni in China that can not be contacted due to this present format....

Using the export function in RE I can export the international addresses correctly formatted, to Word for creating a letter. The problem is it places one address on each page and will not allow the use of special formatting such as labels, to get multiple addresses on a page, it gives an error message.

It will only export in the correct order in Excel if I select "address", the problem with this is that it puts the entire address in one cell. There should be a way to export the address as true address line 1, 2, 3, etc. which includes city, state/providence, postal code and country, in the correct order that will make each line in a separate cell. It would be very nice if Configuration included each countries format so that we don’t have to manually add it, but at least we can change it.

Raiser’s Edge was sold to us as an International solution. The required addressing format for any country would seem to be a fundamental element for a constituent database.

The fact only 5 countries formats are setup at the time of creating the database and the inability to add more later on is a serious limitation and a serious flaw in Raiser’s Edge address management.

All States stored in one field is also a significant design flaw. WA in Australia is Western Australia or Washington, USA - which one gets the WA designation when we have both addresses. How confusing is that also when users on NetCommunity go to select a State in a list that is now 2 miles deep!

Address Management needs to be resolved for International use. We can only fudge and manipulate the addressing into the 5 Country limitation just so far before it becomes unusable.

Having issues with Australia configuration as well...and I haven't even started on some of the other more interesting configurations like Singapore! I asked about the state/territory WA. Knowledge base says to use "W.A." but there are only 3 letter fields for the short description, and they can't repeat, so the support team suggested either "W.A", "WA." or "WAu". I just want our mail to look consistent and correct, so when people from non-US countries get their mail they don't think "Stupid Americans" any more than they already do. :(

I very much support this - especially the option to have a separate County/State table for each Country. We use the NetCommunity donation form, which pulls address settings straight from Raiser's Edge. Our constituents are all over the world, so our County table is chock-full of entries. I've had feedback from multiple user-testers that it's confusing when filling in their address, scrolling through this table of ~200+ entries:
...
Malmöhus län
Małopolskie
Manchester
Manipur
Manitoba
etc.

If there was a County table for each field, we could tidy our database to have only the relevant counties/states appear for the selected Country, making it MUCH easier for website donors. It already partly exists, with the division between the State table and the County table, but this isn't enough. Please make this an option for every country!

This thread started in 2012 and we are still waiting for a solution. Every year our international enrollment increases and our students come from many different countries. Hope this fix is in the works. Thank you.