Going Formal With Salutations

One of the biggest quandaries you may face when you think about communicating with your donors is to be formal or informal with your greetings. In general, there is a trend to become more informal in our communications. However depending on your organization, you may wish to stay with formal salutations.

Formal salutations use titles such as Mr., Mrs., or Ms. Informal salutations are when you address the donor by his or her first name. There are times when each is acceptable, and the salutation may change based on the donor, the event, or the type of correspondence.

Within Fundraiser, the name defaults panel allows you to create salutations that are uniquely defined for your organization. On each record you can choose the informal or formal greetings as well. This means that if a borrower insists that you use an informal greeting, you can. Last, when building a letter template, you also have the ability to decide whether a formal or informal salutation is preferred. This means that each and every time you communicate with your donors, you can rest assured that you can use the level of formality that is necessary for the circumstance and the individual.

It is easy to accept the default settings within FundRaiser for your correspondence. I want to encourage you to explore those settings and think about how best they can be used within your organization. It may be that your organization is more informal, or perhaps the way you code your names needs to be different.

If you have any questions at all about salutations, or anything else within FundRaiser, I encourage you to call our support team. We would be happy to assist you with any questions relating to salutations or any other aspect of the program.