Hi there,
I'm curious if any of you have strategies you'd recommend to ensure that all constituent records have a uniform salutation, beyond manually going through constituent records to update salutations accordingly. We are attempting to bridge a gap in our usage of Tessitura, where we have a small group of patrons who are close to us (board members etc) who have specific salutations in Tessitura for a nickname or diminutive (we have a custom salutation for this) and the far-larger group of single-ticket buyers and subscribers who simply have the auto-populated "Gen Sal". The custom salutation works well for us, especially for things like acknowledgements or communications targeted to a small group, but we still can run into difficulty ensuring correct salutations on mass communications.
Do any of you use things like a piece of code running nightly to update salutations, or an org-wide standard such as only using first or last names on official communications? Curious to hear what has and hasn't worked for your organization.
Thanks,
Max Williams
Max, your setup is broadly similar to the organizations I've worked at. I am in a consortium environment so we do have a cross-organizational standard for the Default salutation and then control grouped salutations per each organization.
We have found the output set element Salutation_sal_type to be useful for mailing lists—I have recommended that it be used in every output set that uses esal or lsal.
Since a record with no specific salutation gets a "Default" in this column, after Execute an Output Set is run, staff can sort by that column and see which new donors are missing an informal salutation (and then add it) or get a sense of if being informal makes sense for this specific mailing.
This isn't as sophisticated as any nightly code but it's helpful for perspective.
-- Mike