Alumni who are married

Sherry Aldrich

We are wondering how people handle alumni who are married. Sometimes we want to send only one communication to the household and sometimes we would want to acknowledge each alum separately. How do others handle that?

Dariel Dixon 2

HOH processing. All single people are by default head of household. If you are exporting a list, you can set it to only export HOH.

Faith Murray

@Sherry Aldrich
I think the most obvious answer is, as @Dariel Dixon suggested, separate records for each spouse, and use Head of Household mail processing. Even if your org generally keeps spouses as dependent records, I would make an exception for these alum and give them separate records. The practice of separate records here would serve you well for maintaining a complete alumnus list in the event of future divorces, widows, etc.

If, for some reason that I can't think of, you feel the spouse must exist as a dependent record anyhow, your next workaround would be to create a unique Salutation type for Spouse-Only Mail, output your mailings through Export (rather than Mail) with the extra field, and split your list accordingly before merging. I think this would add unnecessary workload, though!

Tina GorskiStrong 2

@Faith Murray
I agree with this but have a question related to add/sals. What is your best practice for primary add/sals on those records? And maybe any married couple- do you create primary to be the individual or the couple? Any samples would be appreciated.

JoAnn Strommen

@Tina GorskiStrong At the orgs I have been at, primary add/sal is the individual.

I have just undertaken the add/sal clean up project here. Plan to model after what I used at previous position. Creating a list of standard add/sal that will be used on each record. There are formats for couples and for just the individual.

What I do like about RE is that it can pull what's on the record. For my couple format it will pull both names if present on the record or only the individual if no spouse on record. Then I can select this format for letters, exports, reports, etc.

Faith Murray

@Tina GorskiStrong
I'd base it off how most of your mail is formatted. If 90% of your mail is addressed to them as a couple, then make the Primary on your HOH formatted to the couple. You'd want a separate addressee formatted to the individual for those less frequent alumnus mailings.

For example, here is my own record:

Here is how that formatting looks under Config. Note the checkmarks under “Initial” and “Smart”:

Chris Nungesser

Hi @Sherry Aldrich and @Tina GorskiStrong,

I agree with what others have written. I think @Faith Murray is right on with her suggestions about Addressee and Salutations.

Just in case something here helps, I'll share that I like having several types of addressee/salutations. My team uses addressee/salutation combinations for formal and informal communications. And we have them for communications to an individual constituent as well as formats for joint/household communications. We also have one called Donor Recognition, which is what we use for our donor rolls (as some people may prefer to be "Brown Family" and not first and last names). These are on all constituent records. And then we have some hyper-specific ones for communicating with people like board members, corporate giving partners, local leaders/politicians, etc.

So perhaps you might think about what pulls the alumni into your communication query. That might help you think about which custom addressee/salutation you might need.

While my org is not higher-ed, so I couldn't speak to your team's needs exactly. However, I'll share that my team mostly uses the informal joint/household formats in our communications. We recognize that, often, it's one member of the household that has an affinity for our organization. So perhaps we should only communicate with that person. But, thinking about married couples, we like to communicate with and acknowledge both partners, as giving is often a joint, household decision. There are specific cases that do not follow this rule (and their addressee/salutations are adjusted accordingly), but they are the exception for us.

Chris

Madeleine Holdsworth

@Sherry Aldrich
I use query then export. query for the alums. Then in Export you get set to export both constituents separately when you need to. When you need to send as a couple, in the export output, add in spouse info (we have a constituent code of alum, so this is easy for us). When you have the export file you can filter on spouse constituent code=alum and go from there, to dedupe the couples. We also export the addressee/salutation info and use the couple addressee and couple salutation for those alum couples.

Miki Martin

@Sherry Aldrich I am in an all-girls high school so we have many alumnae. I enter their primary salutations for just them and if they're married they typically also have joint salutations, which are user defined. Since we had one alum complain about us including her husband since the donation came from her, I have since stopped adding joint salutations unless they request it (I still record the husband's information so we have it).

If we are doing alumae-specific mailings, I just pull the primary salutations. When we mail our periodical, in the export I specify I want the Alumnae Recognition salutation, otherwise I pull the Recognition Name salutation, which every record has regardless of marital status (it's our donor recognition). For acknowledgement letters, those pull joint salutations by default and then defer to primary if there isn't joint. So if an alum seems to be giving alone I would have to adjust the salutations on the letter.

We have been debating adjusting our salutations on alums to remove spouses except for those couples where we know they always give jointly. So far, though, no final decision has been made. Here in northern Kentucky, and in greater Cincinnati in general, high schools are pretty significant (if you're asked by someone where you went to school, they're not asking for your college but your high school) so it is a quandary we need to determine how to handle going forward.

Hope our varying perspectives help!