krnye1 wrote:Can anyone suggest a good service for locating members who have moved out of the ward, and haven't given us a new address? In talking with some of the pro's that do skip tracing, they have said that programs like Spokeo, people finders, etc, are a waste of money.
I don't think PeopleFinders is a waste of money. Much of its added value comes from public-records searches, some of which include data of birth.
The PeopleFinders service is most expensive if you purchase it per search. A monthly subscription is $25, but the license does not allow sharing among different users. So pick one clerk and assign him the taks. Too bad we have to eat this cost at the local level, but headquarters pushes primary responsibility for sleuthing new addresses on local units. We budgeted for it this year in our ward, just as we budget for postal mailings and related expenses to find forwarding addresses.
Many of the free services are less reliable. Be particularly wary of services based on "white pages" phones, which typically omit apartment numbers for multi-family residences, just like traditional printed phone books do. I think many of the bogus address records with missing apartment numbers we get in from other wards are coming from lazy searches using such services, without the clerk stopping to verify addresses at the
USPS lookup site, which will identify such address errors.
