Contacting Corporate Contacts

Unknown said:

We are having a hard time trying to get our heads around this situation. 

We, too, have noticed the new behavior, of the "Gen Sal" button in particular, and don't really like it so far, either. We entered a support ticket re: the apparently broken v11 Gen Sal button, and part of the response was:

"

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE [...] in the example you provided screenshots for, do you recall if Ms. [Jane Doe] was the N2 name for the [Doe Family] Foundation?  If so, I would expect that an affiliate record would have been created for Ms. [Jane Doe] during the data migration.  For organization, you may want to actually make the alteration on the affiliated contact record, not the organizational record.  In other words, you should add a business address to the organizational contact, and key off that for your labels and salutations.  Otherwise, when you have more than one contact at an organization, you'll have a tough time segmenting which address/salutation you want on a particular list.

"

So, we should pull the contact(s), not the orgs themselves. We can see what the v11 idea is in this context, but our users miss the old way, and for now there is a lot more manual salutation editing going on than previously.

Thanks for your reply Chris.  This seems to take a couple of steps backwards in my opinion.  So I guess we're supposed to duplicate all the corporate business address info on the contacts file, which means we'll be using a street line for the company name.  Not a great solution!

Unknown said:

Thanks for your reply Chris.  This seems to take a couple of steps backwards in my opinion.  So I guess we're supposed to duplicate all the corporate business address info on the contacts file, which means we'll be using a street line for the company name.  Not a great solution!

I see the logic behind it, i.e. in the case of orgs with multiple contacts, keeping them all segregated in this way is good, but - we've all been well trained in the old ways, and in the vast majority of cases, i.e. one org + one contact, tying that person into the org salutations would still be preferable to many/most, I bet!

Hi all!

I think the advantage to this new modeling for corporate/foundation contacts is that you can now have one corporate/foundation account [ex. Doe Foundation] that all of the contatcs are attached to, instead of multiple corporate accounts with various contacts.  So, for example, if Jane Doe is the Executive Director of the Doe Foundation and John Doe is the Director of Development, you don't have to have two Doe Foundation accounts, one for each contact.  And, through the affiliation type, these contacts can be very easily pulled into lists for communications. 

This does mean having the Doe Foundation address in each of the contacts' account (likely with a Business address type to keep clear this is not their home address).  You can make use of the Purpose Codes within addresses to make sure, when communicating with John or Jane in relation to the Foundation, that you are grabbing the correct address in your pulls. 

Similarly, it might be beneficial to have a contact salutation type that you can grab when communicating with these folks in the this context (so you can include a business title, a more formal format than you might us normally, etc.). 

Unknown said:

I think the advantage to this new modeling for corporate/foundation contacts is that you can now have one corporate/foundation account [ex. Doe Foundation] that all of the contatcs are attached to, instead of multiple corporate accounts with various contacts.  [...]

Agreed, but I think it would be great if the "Gen Sal" button would still build the Primary Contact name into the org salutations, as it used to. This would allow us to have our cake and eat it, too, e.g. Jane Doe could be addressed by name in mailings to the Doe Fnd, as the primary contact, and all the while we could have as many other affiliates as we want, for whom we would need to build business addresses, etc, as you describe.This would save a lot of manual editing of org salutations, I suspect!

But what about organization constituents that have more than one Primary Contact?  The Group Sales Department could have a different Primary Contact from the Development Department for example. 

Unknown said:

But what about organization constituents that have more than one Primary Contact?  The Group Sales Department could have a different Primary Contact from the Development Department for example. 

YMMV, but at our org, the issue I described above doesn't apply to Group Sales, i.e. they are already transacting, contacting, etc. etc. completely on the leaders/teachers, and hardly think about the school (though Development does, at grant time!)

What I described re: the Gen Sal button and Primary Contact names built into org salutations applies to orgs with a one-to-one org -> contact ratio, which would be far north of 50% of all orgs in our database, e.g. nearly all that Development deals with.

And of course, if an org really had >1 primary contact (though "primary" sounds like = 1, to me), they could be set up with their own business address, etc., as per the new method, even with the retro GenSal button functionality restored.

We are also struggling with how to get good address labels for our several thousand corporate contacts who became individuals in the V11 conversion.

II know that the old corp name is now in an alias field, but it is not much help to us there.

It seems like we could move it to an address line, or make it part of the salutation - can anyone weigh in as to which of these approaches might be better? (We currently only use one salutation type, default).

The way that we're mapping it right now is creating a Pri Org Contact & Alt Org Contact as new types for Address, Email, & Phone then keeping it on the company record. Some of our constituents are at multiple companies, and it wouldn't be possible to pull just one (or have a preference of which of the two to pull) if there were two Business Address' in one person's account. It also ensures we don't mistakenly market or contact them at their business in case the address types in phone, mail, or addresses weren't flagged correctly in their home/personal account. We're then also adding the Primary & Alternate contacts as affiliates, under the "Employee" type. For us we need to ensure there'll only be 1 primary & 1 alt contact per business and not being able to create duplicates of these types for affiliations was the decision behind only using the "Employee" type.

In the end look, our record for the Doe Foundation will look like this:

Address Type: Default

Doe Foundation
123 B Street
New York, New York 51263

Dear Sir/Madam
----------------------------------------------------------------

Address Type: Org Prim. Contact

Jane Doe
CEO
Doe Foundation
123 B Street
New York, New York 51263

Dear Jane

Affiliation: Jane Doe (Employee)

We haven't converted to V11 yet, so if anyone has and see's this as a problem (lists, reports, etc) please chime in.