Export Salutation ID?

Daniel R. Snyder

Looking to do some long-overdue addressee/salutation cleanup and I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to export the salutation id? Or even a list of how many times a salutation is used so I can prioritize my searching?

#cleanup

Alan French

Hi Dan, you can export the addressee/salutation IDs by using the "create import file" option in Import.

Madeleine Holdsworth

Addressee/Salutation is a long and arduous process.  We did that in 2019.  You have to run various iterations of queries in order to do that.  There were some helpful suggestions in the community and also the knowledgebase.  The knowledgebase suggested a query, which I did use in a modified fashion, because I wanted to work on the cleanup in segments (by constituency and by a specific attribute). https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/46211


First I would go through your Addr/Sal table and consolidate as many as possible.  Also go through and see if you can delete any.  The system will not let you delete any if they're being used, so this will merely get rid of unneeded values.  Then I would categorize them. You can add "dummy" values in the table and then use the up and down arrows to put the table into some sort of logical order.  I grouped our into PRIMARY ADDRESSEE" "SAL", "COUPLE", etc. and also create a grouping called "TO REMOVE".  I literally printed out the code table to visually look at it to see if I could consolidate any of them.  It also helps the cleanup if your organization has a set way of coding the addressee and salutation (we have a business rule to drop the title unless someone specifically requests that we use it.  Same with suffixes.  Also get rid of as many that are "editable" as possible.  We had tons of those because whoever was adding addressee/sals was too lazy to scroll down the drop down list and must made them all editable.  Not good. If you have groupings of constituents that would be a straightforward cleanup, I would do those first and proceed from there.  For example, we have alums and decided that we weren't going to use a couple addressee and sal for alums even if they were married; we were strictly going to address the alum.  The tricky ones are that the addressee/salutations are embedded throughout (spouse records (constituent and non-constituent), relationship records, participant records, membership.  It's frankly a downward spiral.  You have to keep querying out the various segments until you achieve the results you want.  Ours was a mess, but persistence paid off and It's much more manageable.  A handy trick that I found in the community was to add the constituent ID field to any duplicate addr/sal values.....  All of the duplicate Add/Sals I edit to have the Constit ID as the first field to show and so it is obvious this is a funky add/sal that needs replacing.  Then sort your Add/Sals - it makes it much easier for you and for others that may be populating to make the correct choice. 


Hope this helps.  It's a lot but it's often an area that gets very unwieldy in RE (like attributes....don't get me started!).

 

Elaine Tucker

Excellent way to describe something very close to what I did to get our clean up.  In addition to creating groups, and printing the Addressee Salutation report which shows what the Salutation ID's are, I created a specific text entry on the table of "Editable Addressee" if any of our records need to have an editable addressee this is selected FIRST and then the Make editable checkbox is populated and then the addressee/salutation is edited on the record.  I was trying to find a way to eliminate our many many many one off entries in the Add/Sal Table. So far this is working for us. We are pretty small, and I'm the only one who codes the add sals, so this scenario may not be for larger organizations.

Daniel R. Snyder

Thanks for all the great advice and Alan French‍ where is the mind blown emoji! I never knew that existed. Amazing.