Customizing addressee and salutation fields

Introduction

Whenever you create a new constituent record, either manually or via an import, if you do not provide specific addressee and salutation data these fields will be automatically calculated from required name fields (depending on the settings selected in your account). You can customize your account settings so that the Addressee and Salutation fields will automatically calculate based on your preferences by following the steps highlighted in this article.

NOTE: The “automatic calculation” of data for salutation and addressee fields that LGL provides works well in many cases, but if you want to use specific data in Addressee and Salutation fields for any given constituent, we recommend importing or entering that data directly.

Customizing Addressee and Salutation field settings

By default, the Constituent Names settings are set to the informal salutation style and formal addressee style.

For individual constituents, this means the Salutation field will populate using the constituent’s first name, and the Addressee field will populate using the constituent’s first and last name.

In the case of organizations, the Salutation field will populate with the contact’s first name and the Addressee field with the contact’s first and last name and the organization name. (NOTE: If an organization record has no first or last name values, the organization name is the only value automatically added to the Addressee field and the Salutation field will be left blank.)

You can customize how LGL automatically calculates Addressee and Salutation fields using the Constituent Names menu under Settings > Subscription Settings > General.

Use the dropdown menus to change the salutation and/or addressee style type. If you want to include the Spouse/partner name as part of the salutation, check the appropriate box under General and set your preferences for the style and how the names will be joined, with “and” or “&”.

The General settings also impact how the Salutation and Addressee fields calculate by allowing for the inclusion of the Prefix and Suffix fields, Spouse/partner name fields, and contact names for organizational constituents.

Be aware of these important caveats when including the spouse/partner name in Salutation and Addressee fields.

When using the formal salutation settings, the spouse/partner name will be ignored unless the fields for prefix and suffix are enabled and a prefix is provided in the Spouse/partner name field.
When the Addressee field is set to formal style, the spouse/partner name will also be ignored unless the spouse has a different last name or the fields for prefix and suffix are enabled and provided in the Spouse/partner name field.

Once you have selected and saved your settings, any new record that is created, either manually or in bulk through an import, will use this new default. Updating this setting will apply to all new records. It does not cause records to be updated retroactively.

NOTE: The settings described in this article only affect the primary Addressee and Salutation fields. They do not affect the Alt. Addressee and Alt. Salutation fields.

Updating Addressee and Salutation fields with new settings

Once settings have been updated in an account, changes can be made to an existing constituent record to reflect those changes by editing the constituent record. Click the Update names button shown below, which will update the Addressee and Salutation fields to match the constituent name settings in your account. Click Save to save your changes.

The data in the Addressee and Salutation fields can be manually overwritten at any time by editing the record, typing the desired information in the field, and then saving the record.

Bulk updating Addressee and Salutation fields

If you update your account’s Constituent Names settings and would like to be able to bulk update your constituent data rather than manually editing constituents, you can do so by following the steps in the knowledge base article Bulk updating calculated addressee/salutation.

Customizing addressee and salutation fields

In this article:

Introduction