When a new patron/donor opens enters their information and doesn't include a prefix (Mr., Mrs. etc.), the salutation defaults to:
For an individual: Dear Tom Smith
For a couple with the same last name: Dear Tom and Debbie Smith
For a couple with different last names: Dear Smith and Jones
I pull large lists for fundraising campaigns and would never want any of these salutations in my letters. It seems the only solution is to manually fix each record, which is impractical not only because there are well over a thousand records like this, but also because it doesn't solve the issue at hand so it would require constant maintenance as new people sign up every day. But this leaves me with the problem of having to spend too much time fixing the salutations in every list I pull, and I can't guarantee that I'm going to catch everything in lists that can be as large as 8,000 entries.
Is there no way on the back end to adjust the defaults to, for example, Dear Tom and Dear Tom and Debbie (whether same or different last names)? Requiring a prefix in our sign-up isn't a viable option in today's day and age.
You can adjust how salutations render in TR_SALUTATION_FORMAT. It would solve your issue of Dear Smith and Jones. I'm working with Tessitura consulting to adapt a utility that Mary French gave me code for (it won't let me tag her, unfortunately) to bulk add salutations. I plan schedule it to run every night to apply to any new accounts created (after using it to fix all those existing). The only issue with the utility as Mary sent me is that it overwrites an existing salutation in the chosen format and I want it to ignore any existing salutations.
We use TR_SALUTATION_FORMAT between orgs in our consortium, but also each org can have multiple salutation types. For the most part Tessitura function can be invoked that says something like Dev else primary (it's invoked in extractions and user defined format from a list report), meaning if the selected salutation exists, it pulls, or else it goes to the default. At another org where I worked, some reports were customized to roll through a variety in order, like, assistant sal type, board sal type, dev sal type, ticket sal type... All these methods tend to fall on the operators to maintain their favorite salutations on records and run their data pulls accordingly.
There is a utility you can use to do this for you called Rebuild Salutation. One limitation of this utility is that it can't do more than 100,000 accounts at a time. The other limitation is you can't schedule this utility to run nightly so it has to be done manually. Currently, I have a list going for each account group (1 to 99999, 100000 to 199999, etc). I then use these lists to run the utility. I currently only do this for households and individual account types. I do not update salutation for organization accounts. You could though if you looked for all accounts in that number grouping instead of just individual and household. I run the utility on all these lists Monday morning each week to do the update.
It is a little bit of a time suck and it will slow the system down so it's hard to do other things because of that. I usually do it before everyone logs in so it won't affect system performance.
Once you get the salutation formats set up the way you like, the Rebuild Salutation utility is a good first step. However, if you feel limited by that or you have specific salutations that you don't want overwritten, I'm happy to share custom functionality I wrote for my consortium.
This functionality creates salutations based on formats and salutation types selected by each org. (In v16 a format can be tied to a salutation type, which makes this even easier.) The script runs nightly and only updates salutations that have only ever been touched by the backend, and it only creates salutations for orgs if they have a relationship to that org. Any salutations created or touched by a human Tess user are left alone. This way our orgs can have salutations for all of their patrons that reflect how that org wants to address their patrons.
If you'd like the script, email me at catherine@artsphilly.org.
I'm imagining with all those Utilities you make that you must carry them around on a Utility belt like ...
Katie IS Batman. But we don't talk about it.