Addressee/Salutation starting with "and"

Deb Greenberg

Hi,

I've been doing some RE db maintenance and have noticed a number of records where the addressee and salutations begin with “and”, ex “and John Smith”. While this is not an option in Addressee/Sal in Config, it does appear in the addressee/salutation drop down menus, along with a number of others we don't use. I have no idea how they got on the list in the first place. I can manually correct the records, but how do I remove these items from the drop down so it doesn't recur? Has anyone else experienced something like this?

deb

greenberg@forward.com

Dana Burton

Your RE Admin can go into Configuration-Addressees/Salutations to edit/create new/delete addressee and salutations. They can also be rearranged and sorted here for how they are viewed in RE. (I have left them all there but moved what I use regularly to the top so there is less scrolling. Enabling the Smart feature is very helpful as others have said!)

Sandra Ross

You may see this if you assigned and addressee sal that had Mr. and Mrs….. but the record only has primary constituent without a spouse. The wrong addressee sal is most likely assigned.

JoAnn Strommen

Don't delete add/sal formats until you really know what the issue is. Likely chose wrong format. There are lots of past posts about structuring/organizing your formats so selection is easier. And be sure person doing any formating knows to use ‘smart’ function.

Alan French

Hi Deb, this sounds like it's where the constituent record has a salutation format selected that includes the spouse name (e.g. William and Margaret Smith) but the constituent doesn't currently have a spouse on their record, so the spouse name part of the salutation is therefore blank.

You probably don't want to remove those options from the drop-down entirely, because then you won't be able to use them for constituents who actually DO have a spouse.

If the spouse is the second name in the salutation (not the first) then you can configure the salutation so that the “and” is only present if there is something following it (i.e. there is a spouse name on the record), this is done via the “smart” tick box when configuring the salutations.

If the missing spouse name is the first name in the salutation, I would suggest setting up a query so that you can find constituent records with those joint formats selected but who do not have a spouse and regularly cleansing these.

Deb Greenberg

Thanks everyone for all your advice. I think I should have illustrated the problem better. These items appear in the drop down menu on the Addressee/Salutation tab:

• and William Smith
• and William
• and Smith
• Smith

I guess I don't understand the relationship between what appears in the drop down menu on the Addressee/Salutations tab, and what is listed in Config>Addressee/Salutation. Because those are not listed in Config, only in the drop down. I'm puzzled how to remove them as options if they don't exist in Config.

deb

JoAnn Strommen

As @Alan French explained, the drop down is showing how it will populate for that record. In the example you showed, the record does not have a spouse entered or it would display Sue and William…

They are formats pulling the spouse name first. Last one is just one pulling last name as sometimes folks want that format for a specific purpose.

Alan French

What appears in the drop-down on the constituent record will be exactly the same as what's in Config, in the same order. It's just that if a salutation has been set up in the format [Spouse first name] [and] [Constituent first name] [Surname], it'll look like “Margaret and William Smith” in Config but if an actual constituent doesn't have a spouse (i.e. there is no “Margaret” name to insert) then it'll just display “and William Smith” on their record, which sounds like the issue you have.

If you flipped the first names around in the salutation format so that the constituent was first, and marked the “and” as a smart field, it would only print the “and” if there was a spouse name following it. This page on smart fields might be helpful:

Paige Morabito

This has all been extremely helpful, since I've been having the same problem. I still can't fix salutation. If the editable? box isn't checked, the salutation that comes up is Mr & Mrs & Smith. Any suggestions on what to do about this?

Paige

JoAnn Strommen

@Paige Morabito Go look at the formatting for the addressee you're using. My first guess is you have an extra “&” in the format.