CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hey everyone,

It's been a while since I've looked at the greeting field in CiviCRM.  My assumption has been that it is used as the "salutation" for a record as you send him/her a snail mail or email.

I assumed the way it worked was that as a new record is added, the staff person selects what type of salutation/greeting to use; whether "Dear [first], Dear [first][last], etc. And when they do an export of the greeting type field, it would convert Dear [first] into Dear Tony, for example, allowing the organization to easily mail merge off of that field.

But now that I'm looking at it, it doesn't work that way. If I do an export and Greeting Type is included, it does not do anything with "Dear [first]" rendering it pretty much useless as far as mail merge is concerned.  If a record has been given a customized greeting, then that field does appear in the export, however.  Also, greeting type is not an available token within CiviMail.

So here are my questions: am I using and assuming the purpose of the greeting type field incorrectly? I found a couple of very old forum posts that talk about how it was "underdeveloped" and "underutilized" so maybe it just has never been touched since then. Check here http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,3151.0.html and here: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,473.0.html

Any thoughts on this?  We would be very interested at DT in developing this functionality as well the related "addressee" functionality. But before we do, we want to know where it stands now.

Thanks in advance.
Tony