re-design addressee/salutation tab/formulas
Addressee salutations are actually not very user friendly. If you have a variety of options but a constituent has only FN LN populated then it appears you have the same option 10 times.
a) I think that addressees and salutations should be populated from different tables. Title MiddleName Lastname Can look like a salutation if the person has no middle name. If it gets selected and a middle name later added then the salutation drastically changes. Additional salutations during setup should have you decide which table (addressee OR salutation) it will display and show.
b) show missing fields (maybe in parens?) or at least let this be an admin option to turn on. If it said Mr. (MN) Smith - I would know better not to pick it for a salutation when I just want Mr. Smith.
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Guest
- May 22 2012
Related ideas
I'm hoping someone at Blackbaud sees this thread and shows it some love! Addressee/Salutations need some serious updating--they are something that every nonprofit uses, in one way or another, and the ability to edit and manage them hinders our workflow in several ways! Please take a look at updating how these function.
And while you're at it, would it be possible to have the option to include other fields? We are looking for a random text field where we can store our 'Parent Years', which are the years in which the parents' children graduated from our school. And right now we have to manually enter and update these years on every addressee/salutation entry!!! If we have a text field we could pull into the Addressee/Salutation formulas, we would only have to update the Parent Years in one place on the record. I'm sure there are a myraid of other uses for a 'random' text field on the Add/Sal entries. Please consider making this happen!
Here's our scenario:
We want our parent Add/Sals to reflect the 'Parent Years', which are the years in which their child(ren) have graduated.
Examples:
Mr. Mike Jones '87 P'19, '21, '24
Mr. Jones '87 and Ms. Smith P'19, '21, '24
Since these years are not the Primary Education grad years for the constituent (the parent), and there could be multiple years (for multiple children), we are stumped about how to automatically pull the Parent Years into our Add/Sals.
Currently, we manually edit EVERY parent Add/Sal when the Parent Years change. Not efficient. Not effective. Not fun.
Perhaps the Addressee/Salutations dropdowns could be configured in such a way that when you are scrolling through the list it displays options in a two line code where the first line displays the constituent details and the second line displays the formatting fields.
ie:
---------------------------------
Mr. Robert Hernandez
[Title] [First ] [Last] /& [Sp Title] [Sp First] [Sp Last]
---------------------------------
Bob Hernandez
[Nickname] [Last] /& [Sp Nickname] [Sp Last]
---------------------------------
in this way we could see that Roberts addressee salutation currently displays the content on the first line, however it will change should a spousal record be added.
I just decided that I would actually love it if the formula did not display at all if it contained fields the constituent does not have! Just show me the options that are applicable to this person/couple. Then the list would shrink significantly for those who have only FN/LN.
I wish that the most logical choices would appear consistantly at the top of the list, it can be especially annoying when you are choosing addressee for a couple and there are initials or different last name's.
Addressee salutations are awful to work with. If you can't display the definition with the name (as JPP recommends), display some sort of unique identifier for each definition. (I know they each have a number assigned to them. Unfortunately it's only displayed on the printed table report.) It gives us a way to tell them apart.
I agree with JP
We need to see the field names listed so we know what we are choosing. For example:
John Doe = [First Name] [Middle Name]-Initial [Last Name] [Suffix 1]
Then I would know this is the right/wrong formula for a particular use--we are just missing the data. In fact, it MIGHT be better to only display the formula if one had to choose!
Not sure how different this thread is from:
http://rediscovery.uservoice.com/forums/137015-raiser-s-edge-discovery-topics/suggestions/2695718-please-show-number-of-addressee-formula-so-we-can-
We should also be able to more easily organize the list of salutations. Moving them one at a time up or down is a huge time sucker. We should be able to click and select a number of salutations or a group of them.
I would also like to see missing fields. Additional info about donors is added all the time. Middle names, initials, nicknames, spouse names...
If that donor has a specific way they want to be addressed and someone adds a middle initial, it can change the addressee because we don't know that the one we are using includes that in the formula.