Communications inside of Event Management/Event Registration (confirmation, reminder, follow-up) allow the use of [first_name] but not [preferred_name] which seems like a big oversight.
Furthermore, throughout the rest of Enrollment Management, there is an invisible logic applied across all communications, where the [preferred_name] field grabs from the [first_name] field when empty.
Please make this update for consistency across the whole platform, as it's current use is limited and impersonal.
Thank you for considering it!
I've been fighting for them to fix the preferred_name issue for a while. It worked properly in the system for about the first 6 months and then they broke it with a different update. There are a number of other requests in the system about preferred name. If you do a search and up vote them then maybe they will finally fix the issue.