Globally Updating Salutation and Addressee Formats

Penelope Duus · July 2020

Hi all,

In a bit over my head with this project and hoping someone will be able to point me in the right direction!

My organization is looking to move towards informal salutations. The practice for the past 20 years has been to use "Mr. John Doe, Jr." "Mr. Doe" "Mr. and Mrs. John Doe, Jr." "Mr. and Mrs. Doe," etc. My thought was to leave the primary salutations and addressees as-is, in order to preserve the data, and create new "Informal Addressee" and "Informal Salutation" fields and then create those in big batches based on the format currently used for Primary Addressee and Primary Salutation. In the addresses/salutations configuration, we have 25 formats. I thought a good place to start would be using queries to segment the database according to which format is currently in use in the primary add/sal.

However, when I attempt to query our database by salutation format, selecting, for example, the basic "Mr. William H. Smith," (Salutation format = Mr. William H. Smith), I get zero records. I tried a couple other formats, and at most got 8 records returned. Half of those weren't even the format I had specified (e.g. John when I'd picked the Mr. Doe format). So I ditched that strategy and did a full database query with Salutation format as part of the output, to see what that would show me. Out of 49,000+ records, only 48 rows have data in that column. Those that do seem to be records where there is an additional salutation type (e.g. President's salutation, informal addressee and informal salutations I was playing around with). I checked on how many salutations are/are not editable, and its about 39,000 and about 11,000, respectively.

This is my first time trying to do this type of work in RE and I've never been instructed on any process like this. Does anyone see where I'm going wrong? Have suggestions for how to do this more simply? Resources they recommend? Essentially I'm trying to globally create new informal addressees and salutations, but if someone does/doesn't have their spouse in their primary add/sal, I want to reflect that in the informal version.

Thanks in advance,

Penelope

JoAnn Strommen · July 2020

Your query should pull records if that's the add/sal format used. How did you query? New Constit query > Addressee/Salutations > Primary Addressee > equals ? They will list in the order you have them in the add/sal table. Our first one is the one we use for primary.

I'm guessing that you have the wrong format. They look quite similar.

Are you using the Smart capabilities? I.e. Mr. & Mrs. John Doe when there's a spouse link and Mr. John Doe when there isn't. Use Smart feature and then you don't have to select different formats. Ex. John and Mary Doe when there's a spouse link and John Doe when no spouse link. You can use Smart feature for formal and informal. So you can't assume that just because it shows John Doe that it's using Bill Smith formula. It could be using Bill & Meg Smith.

It's quite a project to tackle as clean up goes. Is an add/sal without the spouse because they requested that? Or because wrong format was selected?

You may want to export all the data, create new formats using # of formula in a spreadsheet and then import it back in. Test with just a few records to be sure it works as you want it to first.

Going forward, I suggest a default set for the different types of constituents you add to your db. We used formal single add/sal as primary on all our records and then also had a Smart formal joint add/sal as next formats. Then we did the same for informal, a singular person and joint listing. If you have a lot of exceptions, you can create a "Preferred add" and "Preferred Sal" that is what they want/request and only use that when present on record, using primary when it's not.

Globally Updating Salutation and Addressee Formats

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