HELP: Need Advice on Best Practice for Addressee Salutation

Keturah Bardouille

Hello:

I'm seeking advice to find best practices for adding and maintaining addressee/salutations with education class year data for all years as part of a constituent's data for mailing lists with certain caveats. For example, one solution would be to pull all data out of RE and add this information once as an additional addressee salutation. However, constituents could earn more degrees after their first. How would I find those constituents to update their records with the new graduation year? To complicate this further, our management team would like us to use their graduation year(s) only if their preferred address is their home. If their preferred address is business, we would only use their name. Is anyone doing this currently?

Any advice or solutions would be most appreciated.

JoAnn Strommen

@Keturah Bardouille
We've considered similar questions. We have many alum who have multiple degrees/graduation years. Also, multiple alumni couples. We do not use graduation year for any mailing addressees. Comes down to why is it needed? The alum knows when they graduated and the USPS does not need to know. ?

I don't know how you could possibly use for only those going to home addresses. Sounds like a lot of work for little benefit, IMO.

I've noticed that my alma mater some years ago dropped grad year on mailings I receive as well. They did add spouse name.

Karen Diener

@Keturah Bardouille

I'm in strong agreement with JoAnn that this doesn't seem like a good use of resources. Do you have any idea what management hopes to gain? Is that based on any donor communication preference? I've found that we really tend to overthink things in our offices, and don't stop to realize that donors (or alumni in particular in this case) may not notice or care as much as we do.

When I receive mail from my alma maters, it never includes my class year and it has never phased me at all. They send me reunion information at the right time, so I know their records are correct, but there is just no need to include my class year on an envelope.

Karen