nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Salutations and Naming Conventions and Guidelines

Brian Walker

I wonder if anyone might have written guidelines for writing formal and informal salutations. I am trying to create a guide/resource for those entering this information into Blackbaud EMS or other products and was hoping someone might have started this process and would be willing to share.

There are so many different ways to do it, and so many exception rules that I am just trying to get my head around them all.

For example…

Mr. and Mrs. John Smith -or-
Mr. John and Mrs. Jane Smith -or-
Mrs. Jane and Mr. John Smith -or-
Mr. John Smith and Mrs. Jane Smith

And then what do you do if one or both are a doctor or military rank? How do you handle alumni grad years in the salutations? There are so many examples I could go on and on. Any insights on how your school has tackled this would be greatly appreciated.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Lauren Henderson

@Brian Walker
All of our Addressees/Salutations are stored in Raiser's Edge, so we haven't generally bothered to put them in to Education Management.

That being said, I think it is a question of your school culture- are you more formal, or more casual? Do you have a defined constituency (Girls' school, boys' school)? Do you take a different tone with Alums than you do with parents? Do you solicit from your people how they would like to be addressed? Hopefully at some point in the future, there will be the ability to set Addressee template formats in Education Management like there is in Raiser's Edge. I agree that it is a large task with more questions than easy answers!

Here is the Idea about Addressees/Salutations in the Idea Bank: K12CO-I-2447

Shannon Krise

@Brian Walker We are still working this out as well, and actually, the question of alumni grad years has not yet arisen for us, but these are the decisions we've reached so far for household salutations. For the individual salutation, we have users enter/update that themselves on the application and through a profile update form each summer. Our admissions office creates the household salutations since they have contact with and information about the family.

Formal

If there is a title like Dr or a military rank, we replace the standard Mr. or Ms. with that title
If the last names are the same we use “Mr. and Ms. [LastName}” although we have chosen not to care about the order, so it could be “Ms. and Mr.”
If the last names are different, we include both for “Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones”
Our development office likes to include first names, so there has been some discussion of switching to “Mr. John Jones and Ms. Jane Jones” or dropping the title and using just first and last names for the formal salutation, but so far we have stuck with the system above

Informal - This one is easier, just preferred-else-first name for both. “Jane and Janet”

Household - We've chosen to go with the last name of the student: “The [LastName} Family.” The obvious wrinkle here is a household with multiple students with different last names. So far we have gone with the “Smith and Jones Family" in those situations.

To be honest, I think we have given this a lot more thought than parents ever do. I've only ever heard one parent complaint and that parent objects to “Mrs.” instead of “Ms.” Since we had already settled on a default of “Ms.” that worked out fine. Like Lauren said, it's really a question of what they will be used for and the culture of your school. I chose to consult admissions, registrar, and development to come to an agreement. On a personal note, for whatever that's worth, if I ever received communication from a prospective school addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Steven Krise” they would never hear from me again.

Annemarie Merow

@Brian Walker

Currently we use the standard <Mr. and Mrs. John Townsend> as Formal Salutation but are recommending that we update our Formal to match the automatically generated salutations in the Family Directory <Mr. John and Mrs. Deborah Townsend> to help consistency across all communications.

John Bozek

@Brian Walker We went through this earlier in the year, from our research we could not find “standards” or anything standardized(though there a plenty of general guides). This led us to having just an internal discussion about our constituents and defining a default that could be overwritten should the family request a specific formulation. essentially we settled on default formulations for informal, salutation, addressee and then updated should we receive any communication from the person.

I ended up having to break the data out and create these in python. some things to remember for rules

how do you handle Mr. blank and Mr. Blank (Mrs. Blank. Mrs. Blank)

consider alphabetical ordering

how do you handle Dr. Female and Mr. Male

professional titles may go first

how do you handle Gen. Male and Dr. Female

are all of your professional titles referenced in the prefix

consider M.D.'s, Esq. (ect. other professional titles that have suffixes)

Betsy Sidebottom

@Brian Walker
I'm replying because I'm curious to hear what others have to say, and on a related note, I'm wondering if I'm missing something:

Aren't the three salutation fields on Contact Cards manually entered by staff (unless you have your profile updates open to parents, which we don't)? I'm talking about household, formal and informal.

Does anyone know if you can ask those fields on a school form so they will populate from a form with the parent's input? How do others collect this information? Or like I said, maybe it's on a form and I'm missing it.