Hello everyone!

I have searched the forum and have not found anything similiar to the problem I am facing regarding relationships so I am turning to you for help. We only enter spouses and/or a business relationship if there is a direct relation to our organization in some manner. For many of our records this is the case but because of this we are sending out duplicate mailings.

For example, if we send John Smith an invitation to his home address but we also feel his company would be great to invite to our event and he is the main contact, would you still mail to both and how would you address these? This is not the worst problem with linking relationships that we have. We would like to send to Mr Smith at home and use his primary addressee (Mr and Mrs John Smith) or the event addressee but when he is linked to the business it will also show Mr and Mrs Smith which does not seem to be professional.

Another problem when linking is that it pulls the primary individual on the record which may not be the relation to the organization, it may be the spouse that is the relation. If I do not link the records, I realize there is a problem so I definitely want to keep this option.

 Any advice?

When appropriate we send mailing to 'John Smith' at home and to 'John Smith, ABC Business' at business. 

I have run into the same problem with the addressee line for the business.  What we've done/are doing is changing primary addressee to be the individual only, "Mr. John Smith" and using putting the couple "Mr & Mrs." as an additional addressee.  The "Mr & Mrs" doesn't seem appropriate for the business to us either. (On internal mailings where I do the merge I have edited my data (access or excel file) to replace the 'Mr & Mrs' with 'Mr.' prior to merging.)

If I understand your final issue, you are linking a business to an individual record of 'John Smith' when the link should be to "Jane Smith"  If that's the case then "Jane" needs to have her own constituent record.  I don't believe it's possible to directly link two relationships, Jane as business contact and Jane as spouse, when neither one has their own record.

Good luck.

We have had similar problems. We added a "contact addressee" and "contact salutation" as additional add/sal types so that we can choose those in mailings.

There is no way to properly link the spouse name with an organization. If the spouse is the only one linked to a business you can make that person be the Bio1 name (and just adjust your primary addressee/salutaions if they are loaded using defaults). In general, we use the man's name on the Bio1 tab but some of them are switched around to enable us to link the woman on the record with her business record appropriately.