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.