Steve McGaffin, President
A letter from Steve McGaffin, President
Hello! My name is Steve McGaffin, and I was recently named President at Paradigm. I have been at Paradigm for over eight years. It has been my great fortune to be surrounded by co-workers who care a great deal about what we do, how we do it and the customers we do this for.
We thought it would be a good idea to share with you some of the measures we take to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the programs we implement for you. I must admit, this may not be the most exciting newsletter we’ve ever published! Hopefully though, you will find the information helpful as to how our processes enhance your programs.
If you have any questions regarding the information in this newsletter, please feel free to give myself or any of our sales staff a call.
Geocoding
The process of geocoding is fairly simple on the surface – type an address into your GPS unit and it will guide you to that particular location on the face of the earth. That, in its simplest form, is geocoding.
Paradigm uses geocoding to assign latitudes and longitudes to addresses. These latitudes and longitudes help us determine the location of those addresses on the face of the earth.
At Paradigm, we geocode literally hundreds of thousands of addresses a day and tens of millions of addresses each year, in order to identify addresses within a specific distance of your system (a buffer). In fact, we geocoded over 110 million records in 2008 alone. We have geocoded so many addresses that our GIS Department has put together a pool to see who will geocode number one billion!
Accuracy
Geocoding accuracy improves with advancements in data and technology. But even with those advancements, geocoding is not perfect. Many, if not all of us, have been misdirected a time or two by the GPS unit we have on our dash. To lessen the impact of geocoding limitations, Paradigm is continuously looking for new data and new geocoding methodologies. An example of this is detailed later.
As noted earlier, we geocode millions of addresses during our audience identification process. Accurate geocodes are known in the industry as street level geocodes. Some addresses will never get a “street level” accuracy rating for a simple reason – they are PO Box or rural route addresses. There are many rural parts of the country that only have these types of addresses. If you try putting a PO Box address into your GPS unit, you will not get very far!
Accuracy Statistics
For our nationwide 2009 RP 1162 Collaborative mailing program, which encompasses 44 states and the District of Columbia, we ordered over 11 million street addresses. These addresses were ordered because the postal geography they are located in (a carrier route or a ZIP code), intersect the buffers of at least one of the 75 participants in the program. Of the 11 million street addresses we ordered for this program, 96.3% received a street level geocode. That level of accuracy allowed us to remove 7.3 million addresses from the program as we were confident those addresses were not within any of our clients’ buffers. The power of accurate geocoding is reflected in our ability to remove addresses from your program due to our confidence in the location of those addresses.
Street level accuracy of over 96% is very impressive. But, what about the 4% of the records not receiving street level accuracy? We are confident we can remove street level geocodes if they are not within your buffer. However, we are not as confident as to the location of the 4% not receiving street level accuracy. Those records may be a mile from your system, or they may be within 100 feet of your system. We simply cannot ascertain their location so we err on the side of caution and keep these addresses in your program. What we do know is that these 4% are within a ZIP code or carrier route that intersects your system.
Methodology
To help reduce the impact of geocoding limitations, Paradigm uses three different geocoding data sources. Two of these sources use street information (like your GPS units) to mathematically interpret where an address lies on the face of the earth. However, our third and most accurate source is based on parcel information and takes streets out of the equation. Parcel point geocoding ties an address to an actual parcel of land, thus removing the need for street interpretation (See Figure 1). This is cutting edge technology which we incorporated into our processes beginning in late 2007. Parcel point geocoding both reduces the number of inaccurate addresses from your program (that you no longer have to mail), and greatly improves the accuracy of the addresses that are mailed.
(Figure 1) |
The red X in the picture above represents where one of our street databases assigns my address. The blue dot is where parcel point geocoding assigns my address. As you can see, the blue dot is in the middle of my parcel and is very accurate. No street interpretation is needed. |
PO Boxes and Rural Routes
As mentioned earlier, it is impossible for PO Boxes or rural routes to geocode to a street or parcel level. Unfortunately, there are many rural areas in the country that only have PO Box or rural route postal service. If your system runs through one of these rural areas, Paradigm strongly recommends that you mail the PO Box and rural routes. We do this for the same reason we mail street addresses that do not get a street level geocode. We cannot confidently ascertain whether or not the physical addresses that are tied to the PO Box or rural route mail boxes fall inside your buffer. Therefore, we recommend mailing to the entire PO Box or rural route in these rural areas. If these areas are not mailed, our clients run the risk of not notifying residents and businesses that may be near a pipeline. (See Figure 2).
(Figure 2) |
The area in red shows a rural area without carrier route coverage. The green areas are carrier routes. Addresses in carrier routes geocode to a street level accuracy of over 96% The area in red indicates where no resident would receive 1162 pipeline information if PO Boxes were not mailed. Not mailing PO Box addresses would leave a significant void in the mailing coverage of the system. |
More Than GIS
We make every effort to reduce the number of addresses we mail while still maintaining compliance. There are a number of ways we do this:
One way we work to reduce your counts is by working with our vendors to provide us physical addresses where, in the past, we only had PO Box addresses. This area of data has improved significantly over the last few years. Many businesses have PO Boxes which we cannot geocode accurately. By garnering the physical street addresses of many businesses that have PO Box mailing addresses, we are able to gain accurate geocodes. This is another reason why over 96% of our street addresses receive an accurate street or parcel level geocode.
Another way we work to reduce counts is to update rural route addresses. Updating rural route addresses is possible due to the fact that many rural areas are updating their rural addresses to more recognizable street addresses. These updates from rural addressing to street addressing are mainly done for emergency services routing and are known in the industry as E911 addressing. It is very difficult to find Rural Route 100, Box 1 on a map (or using your GPS unit). But there are services, which we use, that assign the physical address to the rural route address. Again, we use the physical address (where available) for more accurate geocoding.
One of the more painstaking tasks aimed at reducing counts is one that we have used for many years now, and it falls squarely on the shoulders of our GIS Department. Our GIS Department reviews every PO Box ZIP code along your pipeline before it is included in your program. We do this to ensure that we do not include a PO Box ZIP code in your program due to a gap in carrier route coverage along your system that may be caused by a geographic feature such as a lake or river.
These are only some of the ways we work to provide the most efficient programs possible.
If you would like more information regarding Paradigm’s RP1162 programs, please feel free call myself or anyone on our staff. We would be happy to work with you on any of your RP1162 needs.
Regards,
Steve McGaffin
President
Paradigm
877.477.1162
stevem@pdigm.com
www.pdigm.com
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