Managing Household Salutations that cover more than just spouses

Karintha Marshall

Hi everyone,  


I've only recently been exposed to some of the mailing roster deliverables some folks in our org ask to have pulled from Raiser's Edge.  I've come to find it's quite labor-intensive when we're trying to address an entire family.  


We have a lot of programs geared to young adults as well as established couples and older folks.  So there are a couple of different scenarios we'd want to account for with addressee and salutation configurations: 

• Spouses only - system configured salutations
• Spouses and children under....maybe 16 or 18 - system configured addressee/sals for spouses
• Spouses and child(ren) over 16 or 18 - "[Collective last name] Family" for addressee/sals

It's that last one that's given the most trouble,  as we have to cross-check addresses and manually change household salutations that fall into this category.


I'm considering embarking on a system-wide check and tag project, where I identify all households that need the third type of salutation and add it to their record as custom addressee/salutation types.  


We would then require cyclical monitoring (likely monthly) of these records to see if children have moved out,  at which point the household salutations are removed.  


The initial setup of this seems arduous,  but maintenance doesn't seem too bad.  I  can't think of any major cons to implementing this, but I would like to hear how other folks have streamlined generating or managing household salutations, or how maybe this approach could backfire or be more work than I'm anticipating in the long run that I'm not seeing. 


Look forward to any insight!  

 

Dariel Dixon 2

I think a custom set of additional addressees/salutations is the best way to go for this.  It can be very easy for this process to become unmanageable, but if your organization is already going to be doing the follow up on these families, then hopefully they will share those updates as well.  I'd just make sure that I would use the additional set when you want to pull that mailing list, and possibly have a more formal set for official correspondence.  

Christine Cooke 2

I have not had to have separate Add/Sals for over and under a certain age, but you could certainly have more than one Add/Sal to address those situations.  I have had, and do have and Add/Sal for Household Addressee that is utilized to send to the whole family that is living at the same address.  I put that Addressee on the HoH record, no need for it to be on every record.  


Sending to household has added bonus, in some circumstances depending on who/what you are targeting, to cut down the mail list by up to 1/3 which is great on costs and not killing as many trees.

Karintha Marshall

Christine Cooke bCREPro:

I have not had to have separate Add/Sals for over and under a certain age, but you could certainly have more than one Add/Sal to address those situations.  I have had, and do have and Add/Sal for Household Addressee that is utilized to send to the whole family that is living at the same address.  I put that Addressee on the HoH record, no need for it to be on every record.  


Sending to household has added bonus, in some circumstances depending on who/what you are targeting, to cut down the mail list by up to 1/3 which is great on costs and not killing as many trees.

Had not considered that changing salutation on the address roster does nothing to reduce replication of physical mailings,  thank you for pointing that out.