Ever since the recent changes which enable communications to use the "Preferred Name" field, drawing from the "First Name" field when the former is empty, I think a lot of the concerns outlined below may be a mute point. Lately we have been emptying the "preferred name" field when identical to first name, because the communications are behaving as they should, so this idea is really useful.

Years ago we went through all of our current students and populated the preferred field. It is now a required field. It would mess us up if the preferred name was no longer an option or had a warning message. We like the ability to have both and to CHOOSE which we want to use.

I'm so happy to see that a topic like this is under consideration, but if approved, this can cause a big problem with communications through, at least, the Higher Ed product...in most areas when creating a communication template, we are forced to select either "first name" or "preferred name." If we select "preferred name" (most optimal) then many of the letters will end up with an empty name field if this Idea is implemented. What I would like to see is a logic field in order to address this problem, and then I would love to see this idea implemented because Name "Name" Surname is very clunky for our teachers to use. My idea for the logic field can be found under Idea number K12OB-I-2220, with the title, "Logic field for Nickname/Firstname in all communications." Please vote for it! Thank you!

I would like to follow this consideration. Our organization also does John "John" Smith to ensure that the preferred name if the same or different is used to personalize our communication and know what our staff and student's salutation preferences are. The other first name field is also used as it relates to legal and government reporting. In my opinion, both fields need to exist even if IDENTICAL but I do agree seeing it on the top of the record seems silly - perhaps how it is displayed can have some logic to it rather than preventing the user to populate only one field if identical.

Such an interesting issue. I agree that Name "Name" Surname is silly looking, but at our school we've accepted it as the best option, and require every record to have a preferred name. We've actually developed a fairly granular questionnaire differentiating between preferred name and nickname (preferred name is "everyone should call me this always" eg. Mary instead of Mark, nickname is "please call me this but my records should show my 'real' name" eg. Theo instead of Theodore) and we use that to decide what should be in which field (for Mary we would change both first and preferred names). Identity stuff is really complex and I'm grateful that Blackbaud and we as users are actively discussing this area.

I see a lot of people saying this would cause problems for them but can we all agree that having John "John" Smith at the top of every record is at best silly looking, at worst, endlessly irritating. I too have made a concerted effort to make it very clear on all intake forms/profile update forms that the field is only for nicknames but parents always enter the first name again anyway, and I end up manually removing them on a weekly basis.

But it is the only way to pull a list with preferred names, is by duplicating the first name if the child doesn't have a nickname. Otherwise the list will only include students with a nickname so the Divisional Admin Assistants would have to pull both first name and preferred name and then move over first name to preferred name column for their work.

In addition, official notes pull preferred name and would be blank and look bad. Especially for Admissions Offers.

This would make things challenging for us if they cannot be the same, before we always use the preferred name for other systems. Not having it identical would mean it would be blank and therefore, this would add complexity to how data is shared with other systems, as we use this field for email, salutations, learning apps, etc. Perhaps how the system is sync should be looked at? I see that other orgs are the same as us too. The sync should be looked at to manage matching fields, I do agree what is experienced is a challenge rather than "Don't allow preferred name to be identical to first name" change the logic on the sync.

Because we use REConnect to keep our Core data in sync with Raiser's Edge, we also must have the preferred name populated for every record. Because of the Addressee/Salutation configuration in RE, preferred name is a required field in RE, even if it is identical to the first name. In RE, there are more options to choose whether you want to see first name, preferred name, or both most everywhere. If preferred name continues to be required for us in Core as well, we would also like more options to show only the preferred name and not the first name most places accept for official documents like transcripts. Or if the system would suppress the preferred name if it was the same as the first name, that would also work for us.

We use preferred name as "nickname" and populate it with the first name if the student doesn't have a nickname. This way, the field is populated for every student in case we ever need to pull the field or use it in some sort of merge or template.

Every user at our school has a preferred name. We would prefer to suppress the first name as an option as well. That way we can retain legal names but show preferred names.

We take a different approach to preferred names. Every user has a preferred name - even when the preferred name is the same as the first name. For us, the ideal solution would be to have the ability to suppress the display of the first name in most places.

In particular, we don't want to display the first name on the student's contact card in the General Information area.

To support non-binary students, we need more options for name fields. These options should be set per user - not per role.

We also want to see a preferred last name field. Many students from Spanish-speaking countries have a hyphenated last name, but use only part of that name day-to-day. But which part is used depends on the country.

Hi All,

We are currently researching some changes to the preferred name and how it displays. I'll keep an eye on this idea and keep you posted. Please encourage others to vote on this idea. It always helps. :)

All the best,

Alex Mendiola

Product Manager, K-12

Yes please! We have tried to fix this by changing "preferred name" on applications to "nickname", but when directly editing a contact card, I think it still shows "preferred name". Parents will enter for themselves and their students, either their first name repeated, or their whole name. I have had to manually go in and change at least 50% of last year's applicants, it was very time consuming.

Simply remove the name from preferred name when any one of the follow conditions exist:

Preferred name is:

1) Same as the first name

2) Is a combination of the first and last name ( example John Smith )

3) Is a prefix (examples Mr. or Mrs.)

Ever since the "nick name" was renamed to "preferred name" we get all kinds of weird stuff.