Data Polishing for Inquiries and Applications (automatic data formatting)

Because we care about consistency and formatting when communicating with our constituents, our Admissions staff need to retype many names, addresses, and phone numbers that are submitted via our online Inquiry form. We are currently using a third-party application process because it does a good job of automatically "polishing" or reformatting names, addresses and phone numbers. It would be exceptionally helpful if your Inquiry and Application handlers included or allowed for some basic data polishing.

This would include forcing names and addresses to title case, expanding abbreviations such as St. and Ave., and the ability to reformat 10-digit phone numbers according to a selected pattern.

  • Cedric Paine
  • Jul 22 2015
  • Under consideration
  • Nov 23, 2015

    Admin response

    This is under consideration as part of a User Management project for data formatting. 

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  • Grace Rios commented
    08 Oct 16:47

    This idea has been under consideration since 2015, any updates to this much needed feature? Too much time is spent validating and reformatting.

  • Tamara Photiadis commented
    27 Jun 18:05

    Terrific idea!

  • Chrystalle Kiefer commented
    October 31, 2023 14:47

    This is very important, but it is also important that we have control over how it should format! Do not assume that all schools prefer "Street" instead of "St" or phone numbers that use all dashes instead of parentheses. We need to be able to set these preferences

  • Joe Kemp commented
    October 06, 2023 21:34

    This is ridiculous that this basic coding has not been done on these customer (parent/prespective parent) forms. Blackbaud really ought to be ashamed of the lack of attention to detail here.

  • Reji Samuel commented
    September 27, 2023 14:20

    It is very disappointing that this suggestion initially made on July 2015 has not yet been implemented even after it was considered in November 2015. As a large SIS database vendor, data accuracy, data validation, data conditional formatting, should be the top priority when it comes to data integrity. Otherwise, it's just garbage in garbage out (GIGO).

    Please have your engineers/developers put this on their high priority and get it done!

  • Daniel commented
    May 23, 2023 14:29

    Yes yes yes! Please implement this! Suggested since 2015, 549 votes (!!)...

  • Kristofer Thurston commented
    May 11, 2023 22:27

    This should also clean up extra spaces... auto-complete on mobile devices very often leaves a trailing space that shows up when you export lists for things like printing award certificates, programs, or diplomas, and can be very time consuming to clean up manually.


    There should also be some standardization for formatting of hyphenated and non-hyphenated compound Given and Family Names, preferably with options for how names are stored, how they're exported, and how they're displayed in profiles/on reports like report cards.

  • Kathy Jurkovic commented
    October 19, 2022 13:25

    This is a very long time coming!


  • Jon Sonbuchner commented
    August 16, 2022 14:44

    Agreed - Forcing a format ensures a consistency that is helpful in multiple ways.

  • Guest commented
    July 14, 2022 13:21

    We would make use of this feature if/when implemented.

  • Ingrid Coolins commented
    June 16, 2022 17:47

    Can't believe we are still voting on this. How difficult is it for Blackbaud to write code to format phone numbers?????

  • Bob Crawford commented
    March 22, 2022 18:44

    Here is the issue -- we care about consistence; Blackbaud however does not. I'm so exhausted from the constant cleanup that has to be done for something that would seem so incredibly simple.

  • Peter Cox commented
    October 29, 2021 20:30

    This has been under consideration since Nov. 23 2015.

  • Hui-Chun O'Leary commented
    October 15, 2021 20:12

    It would be helpful if the phone number field can be intuitive enough to shift its formats according to "country", i.e. when United States is selected then it automatically makes the phone number format to (xxx)-xxx-xxxx, but when any country other than United States is selected then it would reverts to a blank field that can accept any format of phone numbers. Currently it seems to only default to (xxx)-xxx-xxxx no matter what country is selected.

  • S Long commented
    June 09, 2021 21:11

    We'd like to be able to chose the format of phone numbers that we want in our database. Right now we have a mess, 5,000 + users with one format and all new users added through admissions with another. If we could choose the format in the admissions application and inquiry form we could have incoming users' numbers match the format currently in use.

  • Lauren Dennis commented
    May 18, 2021 20:01

    YES!! I have international families who don't understand the question and list "Samsung" as their phone number and it's ridiculous that Blackbaud is fine accepting this. Or who enter only the first part of their email address with no @ or .com/.org/.edu.

    Likewise, on Event Registrations people can enter whatever they want. Nonsense years (obviously an applicant wasn't born in the year 210), names of just a ?, etc. And then we can't process the form, so Blackbaud will gladly accept unusable data but then leaves us to try to figure out how to correct it, which we usually can't if the phone number and email are both unusable. If the user could be prompted to correct, it would be so much better.

  • Trevor Spicer commented
    January 19, 2021 23:42

    Would be nice to have some data validation in "on" products! Just sayin'

  • Matthew Poirier commented
    August 26, 2020 21:15

    This would be helpful on all forms, not just inquiries and applications. If we want to do a profile update form, there would be over a thousand responses that would have to be manually reviewed for errors that could be prevented with simple validation.

  • lauren marcus eisenberg commented
    May 21, 2020 16:58

    Alternatively, allow admissions staff to edit the data as it is processed into Enrollment Management!

  • Joshua Blice commented
    February 17, 2020 19:43

    I know this feature would be very helpful with our RE connection

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