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?
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.