CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We are exporting a group of contacts for a postal mail merge and are using Merge All Contacts with the Same Address to avoid duplicate mailings to one address (we have relationships sharing addresses, but no households). However, we are sending different mailings to individual contacts based on their donation history, etc. I am using tags to mark recipients of different mailings (though it could just as well be groups or any other criteria).

In the case where two contacts with the same address are merged, the tags and groups seem to be only kept for the contact into which the other contact is merged in the export. Is there any way to merge the exported tags or groups so that we can send the appropriate mailing to the merged contacts?

For example, we may have mailings A, B, and C, with priority in that order (e.g. anyone tagged B and C receives B). Bob is tagged AB, Jane is tagged BC. Bob is merged into Jane on export and so Bob and Jane receive mailing B, rather than the desired mailing A.

Alternative methods to achieve this are welcomed.

Households don't make a lot of sense for us.

In the meantime, I've decided to work around this by assigning people who have spouses in each of the groups in question to the same group (i.e. forcing everyone in a relationship to be in the same group). Clunky, but it achieves what we need without the significant overhead of using households.