Skype Chat: Upgrades - April 23rd

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Caroline Barnes
Caroline Barnes ✭
Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
in Archived Events

Thank you to all who attended our Upgrades Skype Chat!  Attached are the transcript of the session, and a summary.  Subscribe to this topic for updates on our action items by clicking Topic Options > Subscribe.

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  • Caroline Barnes
    Caroline Barnes ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic

    For everyone's reference, here are some details about the issue that Polly mentioned in our chat, about joint name formats causing trouble:

     

    In version 2.91, we realized that constituents marked as inactive were still getting included in joint name formats.  So let's say we had two constituent records who were spouses, Mr. John Smith and Mrs. Jane Smith.  They are members of a household, with some joint name formats, like Mr. and Mrs. John Smith.  From Jane's record, this layout would be [Spouse Title 1] and [Title 1] [Spouse First Name] [Spouse Last Name].  When we send a mailing/export a marketing effort/etc., we can choose to use joint name formats.  

     

    In 2.91 and earlier, if John was marked inactive, his name was still showing up in Jane's joint name formats.  

     

    After some research into this, we realized that ultimately when a record is marked as inactive, that means that we do not want to be mailing to that person in any situation.  The purpose of being able to mark records inactive is to be able to keep historical information for records we are not actively soliciting, a ‘delete’ without losing the record history.  So, in patch 57 for 2.91, we changed the logic to exclude these people from joint name formats.  

     

    This means that if John is marked inactive, his name and information will be removed from any existing joint name formats on Jane's record.  So where before we had "Mr. and Mrs. John Smith," we would now have "and Mrs." as the name format.  

     

    This is something to be aware of when marking records inactive.  If you want to include those spouse names in your mailings, you'll want to keep those constituent records marked as active (and maybe "Do not mail" or some other solicit code).  If you truly do not want them to be included in mailing addresses at all, you'll probably want to check their spouse record and update any relevant name formats to the spouse fields from them.  

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