Skip to main content

Other Catholic Orgs?

  • February 4, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 24 views

Forum|alt.badge.img+1

Hi All - I posted this under the Fundraising community, but sharing here as well….

Curious if there are other organizations represented here that are primarily working with a Catholic audience?

I’d love to connect and swap notes around things like how you handle religious prefixes and suffixes - and how you work around character limits, how you’ve organized tracking for nuns or priests within specific orders. 

We try to keep everything correct in the Formal Envelope Name field, but it would still be nice to use create-a-list to find all the “OFM Cap” suffixes for example. 

 

1 reply

Forum|alt.badge.img
  • First Timer
  • March 24, 2026

Agree, this is a challenge from a couple angles.

The general problem is there’s no real internet-standard way for disclosing it on contact forms. We try to discourage people from using religious prefixes or suffixes on forms (and don’t make the EA “prefix/suffix” fields available at all on forms because it confuses most as those fields aren’t meant for religious affiliation).

Inevitably many do try to put it in their last name, and enter it differently than before (with or without periods), creating card processing issues, etc, duplicate records etc. We created a form troubleshooting guide that explicit asks not to do this.

There is a buried EveryAction field for “professional suffix” which is different than “suffix” (meant for generational suffixes like Jr. I, III, etc.) but you cannot include it on forms (as far as I know). You can see this field on contacts if you use the “All Details” view, rather than the contact record. You can create lists using it by going to My List > Name.

This might be the best place to put it, but most of it is inevitably managed manually, by standardizing the suffixes (or prefixes, because sometimes people prefer Sr. v. OFS which makes it additionally complex) and just updating the “salutations” and “envelope names” per contact.

 

One tool that has helped is creating “custom contact fields” like this:

 

Then including it on specific forms where it’s relevant as Additional Info > Follow-up Questions (this is a scholarship form) mapped to those custom contact fields:

 

Then, we can use this information to better set religious titles manually on contact cards. It has also given us the simple ability to sort more generally by our custom contact field “Religious Affiliation Member.”

Hope some of that is helpful!