Hi,
I'm *sure* the answer is in TR_Salutation_Format, but I can't figure it out, so hoping someone here has the answer.
We have a lot of online accounts that get created sans gender or title. Esal and Lsal auto generate as Fname Lname. Is there a way to make the Lsal generate as only Fname in this scenario?
Thanks!Megan Hall
Seattle Symphony
Hi Megan,
We ran into this issue a couple of months ago and here is the solution set we came up with.
We're in a consortium and our agreement is that salutations need to include prefixes if at all possible. So for my patrons, I created a list that gathers all of our patrons (based on ticketing/giving activity to our org) that I generate about once a week. I go through and clean up the ones with no prefixes and click "gen sal" on the general tab which quickly cleans the salutations.
You can also skip that button and run the "Rebuild Salutations" utility with that same list once you're done adding prefixes and it will clean them up for you.
It seems like a lot of work, but after some initial cleaning/adding of prefixes at the beginning, it's just a quick weekly thing I do now and it takes almost no time.
Hope that helps. Let me know if you need any tips on the Rebuild Salutations utility.
Kate PowellVirginia Symphony
I should also add that I end up Googling names for genders and find them about 90% of the time...even for the strange names.
Thank you Kate! The volume is too high to do this for all accounts, so I am still looking for the fname solution, but the Rebuild Sal utility could certainly be useful to us.
I have also had great success using facebook to identify gender - if you don't know the person it says "To see what she shares with friends, send her a friend request." Thanks, Facebook! :)
Best,Megan