Merge field populating with another record's first name

Alison Berry

We sent an e-newsletter today through Online Express to individual records and employees/relationships in organization records. The email was personalized with the merge field Dear "First Name". Someone named Mary Jane who is an employee in a company record received an email to her email address with the salutation Dear Justin. The first name in her relationship record is correct and does not say Justin, but there is a different relationship record in that same company with the first name of Justin (this Justin person does not have an email address in his record). In calling support they had no answer as to why this happened and made a guess that it was a one off situation. My fear is every company contact was sent an email with the wrong first name, but we have not heard from anyone else so I do hope it is just the one case. Has anyone else had this happen? And for Blackbaud, is there any sort of patch or fix for this issue?



Thanks,

Alison Berry

Karla VanEgmond

Your experience sounds similar to ours.... I posted this on October 26 here, but so far no one has answered. I haven't had a chance yet to try and contact Blackbaud about it. Crazy busy here!



Here's my previous post:



We are having a problem that seems to me to defy logic.  In the body of an email, we have included a merge field to include the name of the intended recipient. We are using my Raiser's Edge record for our tests - I am the main person on the record and have added my husband as spouse.  On this record are three email addresses.



The first test email we sent, we used "full name" as the merge field. Emails at two of the addresses mentioned me, and the third email address mentioned my husband.



The second test email we sent, we used "primary addressee" as the merge field. Two of the emails mentioned my husband and I together (which is correct - that's how primary addressee reads for us), but the third email mentioned only him.



How are we getting emails merging different information when we are using one email message and one Raiser's Edge record? No changes have been made.  Has anyone else run into this?



Thanks for any insight you may have.....



Karla