Best Practice on Addressee for Surviving Spouse

Lisa Chai

Can anyone share your Best Practices on ensuring an Addressee name will be correct for a Surviving Spouse after their spouse is deceased? Can edits only be made at the time of marking the deceased spouse through the Deceasing Options page?

Lisa Saneda

Hi Lisa!

I change the status of the spouse when I'm updating the deceased. Going through the Deceasing Options to the Household/Group tab I change the primary to the living spouse. Normally, when you mark someone deceased and inactive and go through the deceasing options, it will change the spouse automatically to widowed. You can always go back in later to correct the info on the living spouse if someone forgets. It's one of the reasons I designate myself and one other to be the only ones to handle the deceased entry.

Gail Vincent

I think you might be asking about making sure that the deceased person's name doesn't show up in the addressee for the surviving spouse. You can make those changes anytime on the Personal Info tab of the surviving spouse (and the deceased too, for good measure)--Name formats. Just change the addressee and salutation to only include the surviving spouse's name. Our organization also capitalizes the first name of deceased constituents so that it's more noticeable if they accidentally show up on a mailing list. If they had a household, you might also want to change the name of the household as well.