Last year, Salesforce Foundation integrated our Cicero database of legislative and elections data with their Nonprofit Starter Pack. This exciting feature enables users to verify their databases’ household addresses using CASS, or Coding Accuracy Support System, which is a standard for street addresses in the united states, and then match the addresses to legislative districts. The integration originally allowed for only Congressional districts, but we’re thrilled to announce that it has recently been expanded to provide State Upper and State Lower as well. How does it work? Let’s break it down.

CASS Certified Address Verification

As organizations keep track of thousands, or even millions of addresses, it’s easy to lose uniformity. Addresses can be written in a variety of ways; for example:

340 North 12th, Philadelphia PA
340 N. Twelfth St, Philadelphia PA
340 N 12th Street, Phila PA

This can ultimately result in incorrect datasets and faulty analyses.

Before appending legislative information, Cicero first verifies addresses associated with Households in the Starter Pack with CASS. CASS-certified addresses have a much better postage rate because sorting can be better automated. By enabling Address Verification in Salesforce with Cicero, addresses are corrected to make them deliverable. Regardless of how the address is entered in Salesforce, Cicero will update it with the CASS-certified version. To make things even easier, once Address Verification is turned on within the Nonprofit Starter Pack, this happens automatically whenever updating or saving a new household address.

Legislative Districts
As the address is verified, the Nonprofit Starter Pack uses Cicero to extract the correct legislative district and attach it to the associated address behind the scenes. Rather than a zip code, Cicero matches districts based on full address data, which is the most precise method of geocoding. This is especially important when matching legislative districts because a single zip code can cover multiple districts. When utilizing full address data, the chances of returning an incorrect district are dramatically decreased.

Addresses, once verified, will be matched with the applicable Congressional, State Upper, and State Lower district, which will, in turn, display on the address detail page. The address detail page can be tailored to suit an organization’s unique needs, allowing them to select which legislative districts are displayed.

Cicero enables nonprofits utilizing the Starter Pack to easily connect constituents with legislators, advocate, or bring awareness to important issues. By enabling addresses to be verified and matched to districts automatically, it also saves time and helps organizations to focus more on utilizing legislative district information, rather than searching for it.

To learn more, read our related 2-part blog series for step by step instructions and tips for utilizing Cicero with Salesforce.