Household Addressee and Household Salutation inconsistency

Cynthia Cheng

Hi - I am new to Raiser's Edge and is seeking help to see how to get the Household Addressee and House Salutation “consistent.” For example, if the Addressee indicates “John Smith and Betty Smith," then the Salutation should be “John and Betty." However, I am seeing inconsistency in terms of having only “John” in the Salutation field, or “Betty and John” instead of “John and Betty.”

I was instructed to go to config.table to see where the relationship is from, but knowledge base article indicates that the addressee and salutation are built using fields such as first name, last name, etc. Is there way to go in the database view to see relationship tables or see what fields are used to make the salutation or addressee?

Heather MacKenzie

The area under Config merely tells you how the salutations are created for what options your drop down menu will have while you're in the constituent record. To select a particular version of either the addressee or salutation for any record, that option has to be selected from the dropdown menu from within that particular record on the Addressee/Salutation tab.

So, for example, my RE db has options for “first name and spouse name” and also “spouse name and first name.” For John Smith, the primary record, who's married to Mary Smith, these options would either produce “John and Mary” or “Mary and John” depending on which one is selected in John's record and/or Mary's spouse record. Also, if I selected the first one on John's unmarried/unpartnered record, it would show as “John” but the second one would be “and John.”

Consistency will then depend on what options are selected for each record.

From the Config area, there's a report that can be generated to show you which option has what number on it. It's also possible to export the addressee and salutation numbers from all your records. You could then see how many you want to change and figure out from there what the best method would be.