Including U.S. Counties in Imported Contact Data

[planetrussell]

Greetings, All...

First time posting here.

Q: When importing Contact Data, is (U.S.) county data computed automatically based on zip code, via the U.S. Postal Service API, or can it (must it?) be specified explicitly? Hoping I havent overlooked this in the open source documentation, but couldn't find specifics there.

Thanks in advance for the community's help.

[JonGold]

Hi Russell,

By default, county data must be specified explicitly.  However, there are extensions to resolve this.  There's no "perfect" answer though.

First, CiviCRM is used globally, so it doesn't ship with county data for the U.S.  Fortunately, there's an extension you can use to auto-load it in:
https://aghstrategies.com/counties

Check your Administer menu > System Settings > Manage Extensions - you should (hopefully) be able to download/install this extension directly from there.

Next, how to do lookups?  There's two approaches - either use a third-party service, or create a local data set to do lookups.

If you want to use a third-party service, SmartyStreets has CiviCRM integration:
https://civicrm.org/extensions/smartystreets

Allegedly, they give free accounts to non-profits, but it doesn't say so on their site anymore, so this may not be accurate anymore. 

Alternatively, if you know how to manually populate a SQL database, you can load a postal code/county lookup table - you can download the data free online, and use the "CiviCRM Region Lookup" extension: https://civicrm.org/extensions/civicrm-region-lookup

[planetrussell]

Jon,

Thanks so much for your response, and for the referral to the AGH extension. Greatly appreciated.

So that I'm clear, given that county data must be specified explicitly, I'll assume it's therefore correct that counties cannot be computed or derived from zip codes intercepted by the US Postal Service's Address Standardization (or other USPS Web Tools) API for CiviCRM. Is the use of that API even necessary or recommended for a US-based CiviCRM deployment, and what specific functionality and benefit does it actually provide, relative to SmartyStreets? Thanks again in advance.

Mike

( http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Configuring+Address+Standardization+to+work+with+USPS)

[JonGold]

Hi Mike,

Sorry - just saw this!

I don't use the USPS API - they have a very restrictive terms of use that makes it incompatible with most uses of CiviCRM.  Which isn't to say I couldn't stretch the truth...but I haven't had anyone ask me for that functionality yet.  So I can't really answer your question - I haven't looked at how the Region Lookup extension works - depending on which CiviCRM hook it uses, it may or may not add a county if the postal code comes via the USPS API.