CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

My organization's database contains both Households and Individuals, and they have some specific desires for how to address people. For example, for Households, they would like to address email and postal mail in this manner:

Dear Abbott Family

. . . so in the Postal Greeting Options, I have created a new default greeting for Households:

Dear {contact.household_name} Family

I've done something similar for Email Greeting Options.

After saving these settings, the result is that none of them are applied to the appropriate contacts. For example, with Households I get:

Dear Abbott

My detective work for possible solutions has turned up a variety of instructions about using scripts or scheduled jobs to apply (sometimes forcefully) updated greetings and address data across all existing contacts:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC43/Update+Greetings+and+Address+Data+for+Contacts
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC43/Managing+Scheduled+Jobs
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC43/Running+Command-line+Scripts+via+URL

This all starts getting into somewhat foreign territory for me (and leading me to wish simple, common, non-esoteric tasks such as this didn't require fiddly techno-commands). I did try structuring and forcefully applying the appropriate update scripts to update Postal Greeting and Email Greetings via URL, but nothing I tried seemed to result in any noticeable or desired change in the greetings.

I'm curious to know if I'm on-track or off-track with the documentation referenced above, and if there's an easy/obvious approach that I've missed. It seems like such a simple thing.

Paul

P.S. One additional complication: I have to be careful about willy-nilly changes getting applied globally to Individual contacts. I have directly applied custom greetings for a handful of Individual contacts that are widows, so that for a "Mrs. James Hansen" I get "Dear Mrs. Hansen" and not "Dear James."