Organization Salutations

Hi Joel –

We recently have been exploring how to set up v11 and really utilize the power behind it with corporations and contacts. What’s been recommended to us is to store the salutation information in the individual (contact) account rather than the organization and to create as many specific contact type affiliations as your organization would use such as Grant, Corporate Sponsorship, Marketing, VIP, Billing, etc. What you’d end up with is the organization account is only the generic/default information for the company and then in the affiliate accounts you’d set up a business type of salutation that would have the business title/info in it.

Then (and here’s the tricky part) when you pull a list or extraction that have companies in them, you will want to use the Advanced Relationship Options area in the lower part of the criteria window. In it you’d ‘Add Individuals’ and select the affiliate type (e.g. Primary Contact or Ticket Contact or whatever) and THEN in ‘Keep/Replace Originals’ you’d pick the option ‘Keep original constituent only if no related constituents are found’. (See the Tessitura online help for more detail about the Advanced Relationship Options)

What this gives you is a scenario something like this:

In Tessitura:

• Apple has a primary contact of Steve Jobs which is inactive and no one has updated it with a current one
• Facebook has a primary contact of Mark Zuckerberg which is current and active
• Microsoft with no primary contact

Your original list has:

Apple
Facebook
Microsoft

After you add the options to the Advanced Relationship Options your list now has:

Apple (because you told it to respect end dates and not include inactive affiliations)
Mark Zuckerberg
Microsoft

In Mark Zuckerberg’s account you have a salutation type of Business (or whatever) with his personal account (not the Facebook account). When you output the list through either an extraction or something like ‘User Defined Format from a List’ you’d pick Salutation type of ‘Business’ (and most likely a Business address type) and that would give you the appropriate information for Mark and ignore it for Apple and Microsoft who don’t have that salutation.

This should (in theory) allow you to keep the contact info attached to the person you are actually contacting. In the case of Apple it also should allow you to inactivate Steve Jobs’ affiliation and add Tim Cook as the primary contact without having to worry that you’d send something to him addressed as Steve Jobs (although that would happen if you didn’t keep your affiliations clean). This way also has the added benefit that if you haven't cleaned up corporate accounts and added those primary affiliates you'll still just get the default company and salutation that might still have the contact's name in it.

Anyways, that’s what we are playing with and so far it’s seemed like a really clean and robust way of using the v11 functionality. However, it’s just one organization, so take it with a grain of salt!

HTH,

Heather
Seattle Rep

Hi Joel –

We recently have been exploring how to set up v11 and really utilize the power behind it with corporations and contacts. What’s been recommended to us is to store the salutation information in the individual (contact) account rather than the organization and to create as many specific contact type affiliations as your organization would use such as Grant, Corporate Sponsorship, Marketing, VIP, Billing, etc. What you’d end up with is the organization account is only the generic/default information for the company and then in the affiliate accounts you’d set up a business type of salutation that would have the business title/info in it.

Then (and here’s the tricky part) when you pull a list or extraction that have companies in them, you will want to use the Advanced Relationship Options area in the lower part of the criteria window. In it you’d ‘Add Individuals’ and select the affiliate type (e.g. Primary Contact or Ticket Contact or whatever) and THEN in ‘Keep/Replace Originals’ you’d pick the option ‘Keep original constituent only if no related constituents are found’. (See the Tessitura online help for more detail about the Advanced Relationship Options)

What this gives you is a scenario something like this:

In Tessitura:

• Apple has a primary contact of Steve Jobs which is inactive and no one has updated it with a current one
• Facebook has a primary contact of Mark Zuckerberg which is current and active
• Microsoft with no primary contact

Your original list has:

Apple
Facebook
Microsoft

After you add the options to the Advanced Relationship Options your list now has:

Apple (because you told it to respect end dates and not include inactive affiliations)
Mark Zuckerberg
Microsoft

In Mark Zuckerberg’s account you have a salutation type of Business (or whatever) with his personal account (not the Facebook account). When you output the list through either an extraction or something like ‘User Defined Format from a List’ you’d pick Salutation type of ‘Business’ (and most likely a Business address type) and that would give you the appropriate information for Mark and ignore it for Apple and Microsoft who don’t have that salutation.

This should (in theory) allow you to keep the contact info attached to the person you are actually contacting. In the case of Apple it also should allow you to inactivate Steve Jobs’ affiliation and add Tim Cook as the primary contact without having to worry that you’d send something to him addressed as Steve Jobs (although that would happen if you didn’t keep your affiliations clean). This way also has the added benefit that if you haven't cleaned up corporate accounts and added those primary affiliates you'll still just get the default company and salutation that might still have the contact's name in it.

Anyways, that’s what we are playing with and so far it’s seemed like a really clean and robust way of using the v11 functionality. However, it’s just one organization, so take it with a grain of salt!

HTH,

Heather
Seattle Rep