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.
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.