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.
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.