Hi Pete

We send most of our postal mail to all our alumni, but for our bi-annual magazine we only send 1 copy per household. We have developed a procedure by using an additional addressee in Raiser's Edge and de-duplicating records in Access. It works quite well and we reduce our mailing by about 3,000 records, although there are a couple of steps involved. I can share the procedure with you if you are interested.

Ros Perry

University of Wollongong

 Pete,

 If you really can mark all the records needed as HOH, then can't you just globally add a special HOH Addressee / Salutation for those records?

If so, once that is done you could just specify anywhere in MAIL or EXPORT to use the new HOH Addressee / Salutation if present, otherwise use Primary Addressee / Salutation, right? In QUERY, you'd have to output both the salutation text sequences for HOH Addressee / Salutation and Primary Addressee Salutations (you could use a comibnation of queries (if HOH Addressee Salutation text is blank, then, etc.).

Here's a screenshot of the built-in functionality from mail or export:

 Am I missing something? Hope this helps,

 -graham

We do the same as Graham. We actually ended up with 3 additional addressees to cover this situation. One for married alum in the same class year in order to send one piece of mail per class reunion piece, one for people living at the same address who each have their one records regardless of connection to the college and we just wanted to cut back on the number of pieces we send out and the last is for our more formal events where a trustee has their own record but their spouse does not and we want to/need to invite the spouse to our extravaganza gala event.

HTH,

laura

Pete,

Our policy, when there are alums married to each other, is, yes, to send just one piece of mail.  You do need to have two separate records, one for each alum.  But you can mark one as Head of Household.  And then when you pull mailing lists, you choose the option to send only to HoH.  It's very slick and painless.

 In order not to offend or leave anyone out, be sure that the Addressee you chose to use includes both alums names.  Not Mr. Smith, but Mr. and Mrs. Smith or Ms. Jones and Mr. Smith.

Christine

have you tried to give those who do not wish to receive a particular piece of mail a solicit code for that mail type and then run your query/export to not include them?

Hi Pete,

The answer is in the export.  When I export data from a query I check only export head of household so for those records who are spouses only one newsletter or mail appeal goes to the address.  Hope this answers your question.

Louise Calise

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your input here. I'm still not quite there yet, but I'm getting closer.

The issue still is setting HOH for non-spousal records, making the inbuilt functionality useless for me.

The closest thing I can think of would be to set an attribute or solicit code for marking HOH (or in fact, non-HOH would make more sense from an exclusion perspective), but that means I can't use the inbuilt address priority feature (that Graham Getty highlights above)

So.. The real crux is still being able to address items to, for example, "Mr Foo and Miss Bar", instead of single mails for multiple recipients being addressed to only the HOH record individually.

Anybody got any smart ideas?

Cheers,

Pete

PS, Blackbaud staff, if you're reading this. Please update RE to allow non-spousal HOH records. This is driving me crackers :)