Quickly update lots of salutations

Elisabeth Condon

Hello! I work for a large foundation with multiple teams. Our stewardship team did a huge data cleanup project and cleaned up a ton (8,000+) of addressees and salutations. The great thing is that they cleaned it up, but the issue we're running into is that all the cleanup was done in Excel, and now we need to figure out how to get it in RE. Anyone have ideas or experience doing something like this in the past? I was thinking a constituent import maybe, but wanted to see what other folks had done. Thanks!

Alex Wong

@Elisabeth Condon
Constituent import. You will need the constituent id or import Id

Tracy Dodge

@Elisabeth Condon
We did this for 50,000 constituents via import. Each constituent had about five salutations in addition to their primary addressee and primary salutation. We used the salutation configuration ids for most and the actual text for the editable salutations. Let me know if you want to talk!

Lee Grisham

@Elisabeth Condon agree with everyone! We had to do this to help standardize them and remove a bunch of ones that didn't transfer when we moved to NXT. Not a fun process as finding the ID's for Add/Sal's is annoying. I printed them all out and made a map of what they were and then what the new ID numbers that matched the closest. Then, run each grouping to do a Global Change.

We also had to find any that were Editable and make sure those matched what we wanted or update them. That part was the worst.

Madeleine Holdsworth

@Elisabeth Condon The bane of every RE user is addressess/salutations. There is no easy way. You do need the addr/sal key as mentioned previously. I agree that you should do the imports in segments, not en masse. Often with the “editables” the values follow an addr/sal format, but the person entering didn't want to scroll through the drop down list to find the format. I would suggest trying to reduce the editables as much as possible, as well as first cleaning of the addr/sal table of formats. Search through the BB Community for some other hints, but no shortcuts ;-(

Christine Robertson

@Elisabeth Condon Technically, you can do a Global Change, but I agree with the others and would absolutely do an import. I like being able to triple check it (which is easier in a spreadsheet) and you can override the editable add/sals there (if need be and if you know for sure that is what you want to do).