Adding additional options for Title or Prefix for action alerts

Gwendolyn Chambers

I'm trying to figure out how to add additional options for the “Title” dropdown for our action alerts. I've been told that when the target is a government webform that the dropdown has to match their webform. But I've seen examples of other orgs sending to federal targets that have more options. We are getting a lot of flak from our constituents and for good reason: these forms are not accessible to everyone. Is there a workaround for this? Tech support was absolutely no help.

Noah Cooper

It's true that action alert forms do need to be limited to the Title options that are available on all legislator webforms. That list is:

Mr.
Ms.
Mrs.
Miss
Dr.

Collecting other Title options would result in errors when Blackbaud passes the data through to legislators. What you may have seen on other organizations' action alerts is a workaround that utilizes the only gender-neutral title option: Dr. Some organizations will customize the dropdown so that it appears to offer the option to choose other titles, but under the hood the title actually gets set to Dr. For example, the HTML ends up looking something like:

<select>
<option value="Mr.">Mr.</option>
<option value="Ms.">Ms.</option>
<option value="Mrs.">Mrs.</option>
<option value="Miss">Miss</option>
<option value="Dr.">Dr.</option>
<option value="Dr.">Mx.</option>
<option value="Dr.">Other</option>
</select>

Gwendolyn Chambers

Ok, that explains a lot. Can adding these option values be added to the css or is this custom work?