We've tried something else. (I'm now wearing my hat of Membership VP for the
Valentown Museum, not the one as data administrator for the Landmark
Society.) We do fundraising and have a stodgy older eastcoast membership,
not activists, so formality is important. I agree with Walt (or is it Dr.
Daniels?) that I'm not acquainted with Carl Pope and resent his addressing
me as though I knew him. I modified the calculations and added a switch
field next to the name on the data entry screen. The switch is in the form
of radio buttons - Formal: Yes/No. If yes, the name line comes out Mr & Mrs
John Doe. If no, it comes out John & Betty. This is as fraught with
exception problems as is every other solution. But it seems to help.
I'll have to congratulate the original ebase designers on their current
solution to this problem, given that their initial target market was
organizations slightly different from ours. It's one of the best designs
I've come across for this very troublesome problem.
Gary
> Subject: RE: Salutation field on data entry
> From: "Walt Daniels" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 23:59:12 -0500
> X-Message-Number: 25
>
> Anything done automatically is destined to failure for edge cases. We have
> widely varying information about our members, from only a last name, to
> full
> first and middle names, and many with only an initial or sometimes 2
> initials or even 3. For one person we have only a last name of JLK -
> probably initials run together. For some people we know knicknames and
> some
> formal names. When you try to put a prefix in you are sure to create
> messes.
> For instance, in our database I am Walt Daniels, but I am never Mr. Walt
> Daniels. If you want to be formal I am Dr. Walter E. Daniels, but the
> database has no way of guessing that. For a merge letter I would never use
> Dear I. - only knowing an initial.
>
> We are a hiking organization and hikers are on average much more informal
> than the general public. We decided to never enter prefixes unless
> requested. I think we have 3 or 4 per 10,000. My general feeling is that
> people in general are more informal than our parents generation who were
> more informal than their parents.
>
> I think it is highly likely that except for some fund raising
> applications,
> informal is the way to go. For fund raising, it may be best to be fairly
> formal to people you don't know and informal and signed by someone who
> knows
> them well for known big donors. It really turns me off when I get a
> donation
> request from the Sierra Club signed by Carl Pope as if he knew me. If you
> want to touch me for the big bucks you better invest the effort in having
> someone get to know me and ask personally.
>
> Bottom line: there should be no automatic handling. There should be two
> hand
> filled in salutations, one formal and one informal. But I am willing to
> concede that some organizations will want to do things different from what
> I
> would do, so perhaps there needs to be a global setting done at company
> setup time that allows picking from several possible handlings from formal
> to informal and maybe automatic. But this needs really good documentation
> with examples of what the various approaches will do to you.
>
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