Those darn Salutations!

Moe Casey 2 · July 2019

Apologies if this has been discussed before.

How do you all address your constituents who are couples? We are also a all-women's college, so our connection is generally through the woman and not the man. Some in our office want to go formal;

Mr. and Mrs. John Doe

I'm younger and this bothers me as it seems to diminish the woman, who we have the stronger relationship with. But then it gets messy with titles "Mr. John Doe & Mrs. Jane Doe"? Sometimes we do "Mr. and Mrs. Doe" but generally we want to include first names. "Mr. and Mrs. John and Jane Doe" is wordy. Depending on if we're using their graduation year, then we do "Mr. John Doe and Mrs. Jane Doe '84" but that can be very long, and hard to fit.

What do you all do? Or where can I find more conversation on this?

Thanks!

Karen Stuhlfeier · July 2019

I'm 59 and you would never get another contribution from me if I were addressed that way - plus I've been married for 35 years and I didn't change my last name when I got married. At our organization the head of household is the person who has the connection with our organization. We also have many same sex married couples. We address all mail to John and Jane Doe - or John Doe and Jane Johnson if they have different last names.

Christine Cooke 2 · July 2019

see the attached.

These days, the only folks that insist on the formal for daily correspondence are over 90 years old and only some of them still care about that.

I have always based the Add/Sals on the HoH, and standards have always been set at whichever institution I've been at. When it was an all girls school they wanted their standards based on the female.

Also -- as mentioned, you can't just do a sweeping Mr. and Mrs. anything. So much of the population has different last names for each person in a couple. And 90% of same sex couples also keep separate names

Dariel Dixon 2 · July 2019

I think that the key is knowing your audience. I've seen organizations that are super relaxed with the addressees and salutations, and other places that are super formal. And they are that way for a reason. I would never make a change without considering how it will affect the constituency. Making a change like that at an all-women's college seems tonedeaf at best. What is gained by this change? Making massive changes to addressees can be a really large project.

Madeleine Holdsworth · July 2019

We are transitioning away from using Mr./Ms./Mrs. and addressing couples by their given name/last name only. Our business rule is that the person we have the relationship with comes first in the couple addressee and salutation. Our alumni population is 95% female, so the alum is the head of household and that names comes first. The same applies to our female board members.

Cecily Williams · July 2019

What about formal salutations? Is there an s-tag for "Salutation (Formal)?"

We have some constituents who want to be addressed as Dr. Doe rather than by first name.

Cheryl Olson 2 · July 2019

You've received a lot of good responses to your question for sure. In this day in age I would address informally, and the female, being your target, should be on Bio1 and should be addressed first. If they are married, are you taking into consideration the female's maiden name into your primary addressee/salutation? For the older population, you could always choose an age range, say 65+, and address them specifically as formal, we did this in our database. Titles don't seem to be a big thing anymore. Don't forget you can utilize additional add-sals if you want to create a 'formal' one for something like a president letter or something like that. But as was stated by someone else's post, it's always been up to the preference of whatever company I've worked for as to how the add-sals were created.

Tom Klimchak · August 2019

We moved away from "Mr. and Mrs." anything years ago. We now STACK the names in a household. Certain functions in RE still don't support this but we mostly use Exports to kick out the Constituent's full name and his or her spouse's full name. We then stack the names with the "most engaged/important" person's name on top. That's usually a trustee or alumnus/a and it could be the wife or the husband in a traditional marriage setting. So our envelopes look like this:

Mrs. Mary Jones

Mr. Bob Smith

and our salutations match to be: "Dear Mary and Bob,"

We've received MAYBE three complaints in 10 years... and when we do we just flip the head of household and move on.

Kylea Johnson · August 2019

I am stepping our constituents away from Mr. and Mrs. John Smith (as it was when I arrived--yuck!). I transitioned the database to Mr. John and Mrs. Jane Smith, dependent on who is head of household (which is a lot of times the woman, so we have a lot of Mrs. Jane and Mr. John Smith). Everyone seems to like it! You have to be careful with different last name couples yada yada.

The salutation is quite long so if it's a mailing that I can't guarantee the whole name will be printed, or it's a more informal mailing, I simply use Jane and John Smith.

Those darn Salutations!

Comments

Categories