YSA Directory - Group By Address

This came up during the last round of testing for LDS Tools for android, but I think it really belongs here.

YSA wards, as a rule, have groups of unrelated people who are all heads of household all of whom live at the same address. When it comes time to print the directory, it is sorted by name which causes all sorts of headaches. What would be great -- better than great, fantastic -- is to group by address.

Grouping by household or name makes sense in traditional family wards. However, it is a common source of frustration in YSA wards. Currently, there is no easy way to see who lives where and with whom. When trying to determine needs, home teaching routes, home evening groups, and many other tasks, this presents a problem. It also makes it harder to know if you've got less actives or just lonely folks that are living alone without support. Group or order by address and those problems are all solved. (Not to mention when asking someone out and you didn't realize a "roommate conflict" existed. )

Most YSA wards have someone assigned to make a ward directory and they do it around 4 times a year. For my ward I've created a Crystal Report to do most of the work, but it still requires a good deal of effort to gather all the photos and format the CSV from lds.org to make it work.

As the membership clerk for my ward, I think the most common whining I hear is when there isn't a directory grouped by address. I'm not sure if others hear/experience the same thing, but if the dev team is open to suggestions, a order by or group by address function (even just in the print options) would be a hugely beneficial tool.

I'd think that Group By would be easy enough. But how would it be sorted? If it's by address, how would you find anyone by name? If by address, is it by street name or street number first?

It's a good point and it really is a use-case problem. If someone asks for an address for Sally Jones you would either have to be looking at an alphabetical list or know where sally lives. Often if a ward prints and distributes a directory, they will attach an index which is little more than a short alphabetical listing for just that reason.

For a large number of cases, singles living together are often treated as a group. Home teaching, FHE groups, dinner invitations, etc generally are delt with apartment by apartment. Even visiting teaching assignments are made considering the group (i.e. roomates don't typically visit teach one another.)
As for sorting, I would think that ordering on street first then address would be best simply because it would cause the list to be more geographically sorted. In Provo wards it makes little difference because our wards take up a couple blocks or an apartment complex and not much more.

If it would be helpful I can send you some examples of what people are putting together "in the wild".

The MLS software has a GeoCode feature that will allow you to group your members geographically. The LDS.ORG directory does not carry forward the GeoCode from MLS (at least not visibly). It is an "old-fashioned paper-based" solution, but you could use the MLS GeoCode feature to group and report your members by location for leader reports.

Not a bad idea for sorting once grouped but as for reports you wouldn't have photos. Also you wouldn't want to group on geocode alone since that does not uniquely identify houses/apartments. There are a number of ways to sort a text list by address, but that doesn't quite solve the need. If the online directory could pull and group on geocode that would be slick, though not really required to solve the basic issue.

rontilby wrote:The MLS software has a GeoCode feature that will allow you to group your members geographically. The LDS.ORG directory does not carry forward the GeoCode from MLS (at least not visibly). It is an "old-fashioned paper-based" solution, but you could use the MLS GeoCode feature to group and report your members by location for leader reports.

There are lots of ways to group by address if you export the data. One inherent weakness is that MLS and related online systems is that our address data tends to be dirty. There is no address standardization, and clerks may enter the same address differently on different records. This can be mitigated but probably not eliminated through discipline.

Ross,
You're absolutely right about the dirty address data. I spent a good amount of time coming up with a programmatic solution to building a picture directory and that was always a problem. You're also right about the address reports -- there are a ton of ways to group them by address, but no single easy way to create a photo directory grouped in that manner.

Keep in mind that it isn't just leadership that use this kind of thing. When I announced in our Elder's Quorum that we were doing the directory pictured above there were actual cheers and clapping.

The simple group by on the PDF print would mean that people could mothball their current solutions (which range from a glue stick and scissors to visual studio) and just use the tools the church provides.

If this is something that the dev team is interested in evaluating I'd be happy to write up a slew of use cases, scenarios, whatever is needed. I'd volunteer to code it, but my code is almost always terrible hacks so it's best I don't do that.

Of course this is just my suggestion -- I don't want to be the annoying pain in the rear end user that makes you want to kick puppies .

Thanks for the input and feedback and interest in my idea!

I think that it would be very helpful to have individuals grouped by address.
Sort by order would be something like: state, city, street name, house number, apartment number, last name.
This way apartment complexes in neighboring towns don't jumble the directory, and every apartment is sorted within its complex.
It's not perfect and there are definitely situations where it might not work the best, but it's certainly much more coherent than just a list of households with a single individual in each.
It's something that family wards will definitely benefit from as well since it makes it easier to group together families for visiting/home teaching.
How many Bishoprics and RS/EQ presidencies waste so much time looking at a map trying to figure out home teaching routes or car pooling for neighboring families? Answer: every unit I've ever been in.

I am an EQP in a YSA ward, and I would LOVE a "group by" option. It would make my life so much easier when I organize home teaching, PPI's, visits, etc.

Just a thought - isn't there a feature that groups households on Maps? Is there a way we could expand that to the Directory?

I am a councilor in a YSA bishopric and we too struggle creating the ward directory by apartments. It is necessary to group by apartments as we assign callings, create family home evening groups, etc. . .

A group by feature on lds.org would be very helpful, but if not, we want to know a good way to produce one using microsoft office. Is there an easy way to organize address', pictures, and phone numbers to produce a ward directory by apartment?

n8elgr8 wrote:

rontilby wrote:The MLS software has a GeoCode feature that will allow you to group your members geographically.

...Also you wouldn't want to group on geocode alone since that does not uniquely identify houses/apartments.

GeoCode can be anything you want so it *could* be use to "uniquely identify houses/apartments". Since the GeoCode can be 8 characters long, with each character a letter or a number, that gives you 36**8 possible combinations. You could assign a unique geocode to every member of the church almost 200,000 times.

Of course, you might want your GeoCode to have a little sense to it. You can see http://tech.lds.org/wiki/Geocode for examples of patterns to use, but you can obviously come up with your own.

RossEvans wrote:There are lots of ways to group by address if you export the data. One inherent weakness is that MLS and related online systems is that our address data tends to be dirty. There is no address standardization, and clerks may enter the same address differently on different records. This can be mitigated but probably not eliminated through discipline.

That's definitely an issue especially if you have frequent turnover with your ward clerks but dirty data can certainly be eliminated, not just mitigated. But as you noted, it takes discipline (and a little time). I've only been our ward clerk for 4 months but it only took me a couple hours to clean up our data. I had exported the data so that I could create a ward directory (before I started printing them via the online directory options) and I would do global search and replace in my word document. Some addresses didn't match my pattern so I'd fix them. I wanted my directory to fit on one side of the paper so I would change things like 'Road' to Rd. If there was a 'road' or 'ROAD', then they would stick out as exceptions to my replacements and I'd fix their data.

I'd do the same with town names and even the state. Sometimes I'd have 'North Carolina' and sometimes it would be 'north carolina' or 'nc' or 'NC'. I actually remove the state name from the directory since our ward doesn't go across a state boundary.

Same with phone numbers. I wanted the phones to look consistent (ok, maybe I'm a little OCD), using dashes between the groups of numbers instead of parens around the area code. Since most of our members have local phone numbers, I remove the area code for them but leave the ones with long distance cell phone numbers, which is probably the norm for student wards - lots of out of town area codes. Doing that kind of replacement also showed the records that were dirty.

Anyway, I think this horse is long beaten dead by now but the main point is you can clean up the data fairly easily. As new records come in, you'd have to look at them to see if they fit your pattern.

I could send the list of things I changed in the exported data to make my directory if anyone was interested. It's not that exciting but might give you a way to clean up your data.

Now, with all that said, I agree with the original point of this thread that having something built-in that *also* filters up to lds.org would be nice.

We've added this request to our list of proposed features for a release of Directory. Thanks for suggesting it.