Customizing addressee and salutation fields

LGL Short Video: How LGL calculates the Salutation and Addressee fields

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have specific preferences regarding the data in your Salutation/Addressee fields, we recommend considering importing that data directly, rather than relying on the automatic creation of this data through customizing these fields. The automatic creation of salutation and addressee works in most, but not all, cases. 

You can customize how your Addressee and Salutation fields (whether informal or formal) are calculated using the General menu option in Settings > Subscription Settings.

Once you have selected your settings, any new record created (either by manually adding a constituent record or uploading constituents in bulk via the Flex Importer) will use this new default. Please note that updating this setting does not cause records to be updated retroactively.

NOTE: Additional fields available in the constituent record for an alternative addressee and salutation (named "Alt. addressee" and "Alt. salutation", respectively). However, the settings described in this article affect only the primary Addressee and Salutation fields. They do not affect the Alt Addressee or Alt Salutation fields.

The default settings for constituent name salutation and addressee are “First Name” and “First name Last name”, respectively.

If you decide to use the formal addressee and salutation style, you can make your selections using the dropdown menus provided. 

You can choose to display prefix or suffix, and whether to include the spouse name. 

NOTE: When the last names are the same for both the primary and spouse/partner and you want both names in the Addressee/Salutation and Annual Report Name fields to be calculated, a prefix is required for both the primary and the spouse/partner. 

NOTE: If the spouse name does not include a last name, LGL will ignore the spouse name when creating the "Addressee" and "Annual report name" fields. In addition, if you are switching from informal to formal names and want to include a spouse prefix, you will need to provide it in the Spouse Name field--it will not be generated automatically.

To see changes reflected in an existing constituent record, go to the constituent details page, choose Edit, and click the Update names button. If you choose for the addressee and salutation to be formal, be sure you populate the Prefix or Suffix fields in those records with the appropriate name information.

If you're updating records one by one and you create a new record in your account, your settings will be applied. You can overwrite them at any time by typing in the field.

If you upload a spreadsheet using the Flex Importer, any data you provide for Addressee or Salutation fields will be preserved in LGL and will override the defaults.