Associations for Salutations

Hi Everyone,

At my organization, many organizational records such as businesses that have given contributions to our gala, are entered without a particular contact name. Often, there's a contact name in Associations, but these associations came from our data conversion process and are usually "soft" associations. I'd like to be able to use some of these "soft" associations as saluations when pulling a list for an upcoming mailing, but I'm not sure if there's an easy way to do it. Can I pull just a certain type of association into an output set? Or does anyone have any suggestions about the best way to get these associations into the list so I can use them for salutation purposes?

  • One way you could do it (but it might be time consuming and clutter up the corporate record depending on how many people) is to create unique salutations with each contact’s name and title and then associate each individual salutation to the corporate address (so you’d have to create multiple of the same addresses) and mark that address with an invitation mail purpose. You’d need to use an output set to get all of the addresses to export out.

     

    It’s definitely a kludgy work around. And time consuming the first go around, but for the future it would be a quick way to export them out if you’re always inviting the same contacts.

     

    -Marta

     

     

    From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Gina Napolitano
    Sent: Friday, March 25, 2011 3:54 PM
    To: marta@smm.org
    Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Associations for Salutations

     

    Hi Everyone,

    At my organization, many organizational records such as businesses that have given contributions to our gala, are entered without a particular contact name. Often, there's a contact name in Associations, but these associations came from our data conversion process and are usually "soft" associations. I'd like to be able to use some of these "soft" associations as saluations when pulling a list for an upcoming mailing, but I'm not sure if there's an easy way to do it. Can I pull just a certain type of association into an output set? Or does anyone have any suggestions about the best way to get these associations into the list so I can use them for salutation purposes?




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  • Former Member
    Former Member $organization

    Hi Gina.  You probably do want to go through and change those soft associations to hard ones with their own records.  Associate data (hard and soft) shows up in the Full Bio report, but I haven't seen it in exportable form in any standard report.

    Once you have records for each of your contacts, they can be pulled based on those associations into Lists or Extraction segments.  For many Gala mailings at City Center, we use an Extraction segment that suppresses all Institutional records.  In the following segment, we do something like "all Gala donor records plus any Associated Primary Institutional Contacts".  The actual Institutional records get suppressed, but their contact names make it through.

    Again, you have to give those contacts their own records.  Not fun, but it pays off.

  • Gina,

     

    There are “Salutation Types” under the Names tab. You could set up a particular Salutation Type and pull that for the records you need. See if that works for you.

     

    Thanks,

     

    Marie F. Kocher

    Development Assistant

    Kansas City Ballet

    1616 Broadway

    Kansas City, MO  64108

    (816) 931-2232 x 1310

    www.kcballet.org

     

    "Making Kansas City a destination for dance."


    From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Gina Napolitano
    Sent: Friday, March 25, 2011 3:54 PM
    To: Marie Kocher
    Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Associations for Salutations

     

    Hi Everyone,

    At my organization, many organizational records such as businesses that have given contributions to our gala, are entered without a particular contact name. Often, there's a contact name in Associations, but these associations came from our data conversion process and are usually "soft" associations. I'd like to be able to use some of these "soft" associations as saluations when pulling a list for an upcoming mailing, but I'm not sure if there's an easy way to do it. Can I pull just a certain type of association into an output set? Or does anyone have any suggestions about the best way to get these associations into the list so I can use them for salutation purposes?




    This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Development Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Development forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!

  • If you just want to get this mailing out without doing a lot of data entry/account creation you might want to have a look at the Association Analysis report in the Development folder.    If you save it to excel and merge with another report that contains addresses, you might be able to get what you're looking for.  I have found vlookup in excel to be useful in merging different spreadsheets in cases like this.


    Dale