We are often wanting to mail to "Dear Bob and Nancy" instead of "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bob Smith". I know I can use N1 and N2 as list elements, however, unlike the salutation that is updated after one of the two people die, N1 and N2 will always be on the main screen.
i.e. let's say Bob has passed on, and so the intent would be just to mail "Dear Nancy" Right now we have to pull a list of all N1 that are deceased, delete thier names from the excel, then follow those steps again for N2.
The only suggestion I have gotten is to create a salutation type of Informal Names, and it's my understanding that I would have to hand enter all of these names(for all of our records), and then remember to update that salutation type if there is a new deceased status update. This seems daunting and clunky.
Am I missing something, what are other organizations doing to greet their patrons on a first name basis in mailings?
Heather,
We have "first name" salutations set up for most of our higher-level donors. These are set up manually when a constituent becomes a donor of a certain level.
Yes, you would have to manually adjust this salutation if N1 or N2 is deceased. This is not a big deal for us as we have numerous salutations for many of our constituents and people here have been trained to always update this area when updating the primary salutation.
Dale
Hi Heather,
We use to have an informal salutation to use when in a situation like this and I think it's probably pretty commonplace. We have however since decided to combine our informal salutation with our standard one and make the "dear" line (lsal_desc, salutation_inside) of the standard the patrons first name(s) thus making the informal salutation unnecessary. (in our case)This has worked well for us and didn't cause us to really loose any options the separate informal salutation may have offered.