Salutations for Women other than Mrs. Ms. or Miss.

Kristen Sorensen:

I am wondering how you handle or if you have a policy for how to handle women who have a title other than Mrs. Ms. or Miss.  Such as Dr., Professor, Ph.D and the like.  I am particularly interested in how you list the addressee/salutations if they have a spouse, i.e. Mary Smith, Ph.D is married to John Smith.  Thank you,

As 98% of our correspondence uses informal addressee/salutations (John & Mary Smith) we don't have many issues to deal with.  If we know that the constituent prefers their professional title over Mr./Mrs/etc we put Dr./The Honorable or desired title in as Title 1 and it is used when we do formal format. So in your example, we would use Mr. & Dr. John Smith. Or Dr. Mary Smith if correspondence just to her.  I know we have a couple dozen that pull in that format. 

Basically it's the same as for men - if preference is known we use it. If I don't know their preference but know they have title of "Dr." I enter "Dr." as title 1 on their record.

For use of Ph.D./DDS/CPA/etc that we consider this a suffix vs. title.  We put professional suffix in Suffix 2 field.  Use Suffix 1 field for Sr/Jr etc.

Just one of doing it...

Allison Mcintyre:

 We have a lot of situations where one or both partners are a Dr. or Professor.

For formal addressees, such as for envelopes:

If both are Dr.'s we would use Drs. John and Mary Smith

If both are Professors, we would use The Professors Smith or The Professors John and Mary Smith

If he is the Dr. or Professor, we would use Dr. and Mrs. John Smith

If she is the Dr. or Professor, we would use Dr. Mary Smith and Mr. John Smith.

 Of course, sometimes we know their preference and that would override our standard entry.

 

I hope this helped!