Name formats on contacts for organizations

Kelly Olson

When we send acknowledgment letters to organizations, we sometimes want to send to the contact on the record and other times we want to address the letter to both the contact and their spouse. For example, if a corporation makes a donation, we would address the acknowledgement letter to our contact at the organization, Person X. However, if Person X also gives to us via a Family Foundation, we would want to address that letter to both Person X and Person X's spouse. I can't figure out how to use different name formats in different situations with the acknowledgment letters. What I think I want is to be able to specify the name format based on a constituency code. Any insight on this? Thanks!

Chris Nungesser

Hi @Kelly Olson!

Acknowledgment letters can be a little tricky! But I think what you're describing can be done. Here are a couple of things to consider:

• Acknowledgment Letter Query. As you know, each letter is based on a query/selection (or a group of queries/selections). So you'd need to make a letter for each of these scenarios. If it is consistently Foundations versus Corporations, then yes, perhaps a Constituency Code would work. Also, maybe on the Organization's record, you could look at using the Industry dropdown field. Depending on how you organize your constituency codes, that might be cleaner (to borrow from a different field). But yes, I believe you'll need separate Letters (and thus separate Queries/Selections) for each of these situations.
  
  If this isn't something that applies to the entire constituent record, like some gifts need this and some do not, then maybe you could use a field within the Payment window. Maybe Revenue Type or Revenue Reference could work, just depending on how you use those fields now, of course. But this would allow you to say some of this constituent's gifts follow this rule, but not all gifts on the record.
  

Name Format Options. I think you'll need to set up different Name Format Options for each of these situations. So you'll run your letter(s) including the Corporations and you won't run the Foundations letter(s). Next, when you run Foundations, you would change the Processing Options (listed below your list of Acknowledgments) to a different Name Format Option so that it'll know to treat contacts differently.

Half-Baked Side Thought:

This is a half-thought. I mention it in case you read this and something clicks for you. Maybe you can connect the pieces that I'm missing.

I was wondering if you could do this without having to jump back and forth between Name Format Options. You'd still need different Letter Queries. So for Foundations, I wonder if you could pull the desired Addressee/Salutation of the person listed as the first constituent to receive Recognition Credit for the gift. Or maybe the constituent that is receiving a particular type of recognition credit - say the Donor recognition credit. This would obviously depend on how you do Recognition. But I think this is possible. It might be a little gnarly getting the Acknowledgment Merge Fields right. And I think your team would need to be consistent with the order in which you apply Recognition and the Type of Recognition. But if it could be done, that might be worth it just to avoid having to switch Name Format Options.

The challenge was in the Acknowledgment Merge Fields, trying to tell Altru which constituent's name addressee/salutation to pick. I looked for a few minutes, but couldn't totally work it out. So it might not be possible. And you'd need to think about situations with multiple people getting credit or even multiple applications. I think there are some ways to negotiate this, but I wouldn't feel confident in the method without doing some serious testing first (and maybe coordinating with my Customer Success Manager or Support).

I apologize that this response is so long. I hope some of this is making sense. It's getting late and my brain is fried. Good luck.

Chris

Kelly Olson

Thanks Chris. Somehow it never occurred to me to run the process twice and switch the name format options back and forth. While not perfect, I think that will go a long ways towards what I want. I will think about your other suggestion but I don't think we are as consistent with recognition credit as we would need to be. Again, huge thanks!