Hello,

I am in the process of doing a magazine mailing to my entire database and have been told to only send on magazine to each address. I'm looking for the quickest, least painful way to make this happen.

In some cases there are 4 constituents per household. 

In the past, I've manually gone through the excel spreadsheet, deleted and renamed the addressees to "The Smith Family."

This seems a two-fold process.  1) cutting down on the # of addresses and 2) possibly adding another "Addressee" type to certain records.

Thanks in advance for any help and suggestions.

Maren Madore

Friends Academy

mmadore@friendsacademy1810.org

Unfortunately it Will not be until version 8 that true household processing will be available.  I believe you will be able to connect an entire family (or roommates) to a household and process mail using that household.

Until then your options are limited.  If you have a solicit code or attribute of NO NEWSLETTER you can add it to everyone in the household who you do not want to get the newsletter then add an "newsletter addressee" to the one person getting it of "The Smith Family".  It will take time to set up but once done it should work for future newsletters.

Cautions: when someone leaves the household you will need to remember to remove the NO NEWSLETTER code from their record.

Thanks for your help--great suggestion.  I think I'll go the attribute route.

Best,

Maren

Attributes are really good for this because you can easily exclude them in most all Mail functions.  They also allow you to add a date and a comment to explain why they get no newsletter.

 Your task is more complicated and attributes are probably the best route.  Another alternative is to mark one person the head of household.  Then when you pull the mailing list, choose to mail only to the head of household.  This only works well if all household member relationships are established.  When someone leaves that address, you can simply mark them head of a new household.

Head of Household is only available for spouse relationships - not any other kind of family relationships.  And a constituent can only have one spouse at a time so you can't fake use the spouse checkbox to indicate a family relationship.  For non-spousal family members living at the household you must use some other kind of coding to keep them from getting mailings they should not get.

Melissa