Sending emails with NXT to constituents including individuals and organizations

Yvette Lam

How are you using NXT to send emails to both individuals and organizations? I am having trouble sending to organizations. In the email greeting line (Dear ‘first name’), it would show the full business name (eg. Dear ABC Inc.) rather than the primary contact's name.

Do you separate individuals and organizations into two lists? And is there a field for business primary contact to use in NXT emails? Help!

Heather MacKenzie

Following! I have the same question.

Maryanne Askwyth

I use the Nickname field for the Organization contact salutation. I always populate that even if they do not have a nickname. You can use F3 to quickly fill in the Nickname field with their first name.

Yvette Lam

Thanks so much for the tip! Is that same as Aliases field in organization accounts? And I don't see Nickname/Aliases as available fields to use in NXT Emails....see screenshot attached

Yvette Lam

Glad I'm not alone on this! ?

Christyn Schnell

First of all, this is a great question and one that I had to create a solution for back in August. There are 2 separate items within this string that I will comment on separately:

1. The use of a Nickname or Alias field to use in your salutation of your email. Within web view the Nickname field is the “Preferred Name” which is actually what I renamed it within our database view to avoid confusion. Instead of only using this field to show if someone goes by some other name other than their birth name (Tom vs Thomas) we use this field now to show the preferred first name as the naming convention suggests (Thomas who actually goes by Thomas) so, as this may appear repetitive, it allows us to use the Preferred Name across the board in our emails, otherwise web view (at least as of right now) would only be able to personalize those that have something in the Preferred a.k.a. Nickname field and the others would come out blank. As far as using that to communicate to organization contacts, that is not something the system is capable of right now and I do not have a solution for…unfortunately.

2. At my organization, I created the following solution after speaking with Blackbaud and finding that they did not have a solution in place to email organizations. This did require duplicating the email being sent out with one to individuals and the other to organizations with the following process behind it:

As a best solution, instead of creating separate constituent records for contacts within an organization’s record, I did a mass upload of the emails associated with different types of organizational contacts. We have Main Contacts, Secondary Contacts, Scholarship Contacts, Sponsorship Contacts, etc. Each of those contacts had their email added to the Organization records Org 1 tab (in database view) with their respective email “type” based on their contact type. So, for example, if Sam Jones was the main montact for ABC Company, his email (if we had one on file for him) would be added to the organization's main record with the email type of “Main Contact Email”. There HAS to be one email per organizational record that would be marked as “Primary” via the primary checkbox. (This is true for Individual records as well, so if you haven't done that massive clean up, I wish you luck on your journey). That email that is marked as Primary will default to the individual identified as the organization’s “Main Contact” but can be changed to any other email type within the Organization’s records as deemed more appropriate by the Organization’s primary solicitor or knowledgeable employee.

As I found, if an email is set to go out to both org and ind record-types, the email will need to be duplicated in order to have the ability to send it out to all who meet the communication’s criteria.

The email to individuals would be set to go to the email that is marked as “Is Primary”

The email to organizations could be set to go to the email marked as “Is Primary” OR to the email type that is more appropriate for the communication going out (like, for example, if you are sending out an ask for event sponsors you may have the email go out to organization's that have the “Sponsorship Contact Email” type.

I hope that I was able to explain my logic in a way that is understood. Let me know if this works for anyone else or if you see anything I may be missing. This is a tough cookie to crack for sure!

Jeremy Freemantle

We use a different email service, so I'd never looked at NXT Email before. ? It appears there aren't options to choose a relationship contact or even use an Alias/Name format where you might record a contact name. I don't see a way around doing these lists separately with the NXT tool. Might be one for the Ideas Bank?

As we don't use NXT for email, we can use salutations (AKA Name formats) from individuals/organisation contacts:

- Contact type Attributes are assigned to organisation relationship contacts, then for emails/letters lists we select the appropriate contact(s) by the attributes.
- The relationship contact has salutations, which are used in emails/letters to organisations.
- With letters, we use address processing and select organisation contact by attribute (I use attributes instead of Contact Type as some contacts receive multiple types of correspondence).