Salutations and Naming Conventions and Guidelines

@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.

@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)