What is the best way to add a primary contact person to an organizational record?

Hmmmm, you have a few options for how to do this and I recommend using Custom Contact Fields rather than repurposing a different field (edit: if you’re set on not creating a separate person contact record that is).

Here’s why:  if your goal is to be able to use merge fields in Targeted Email, then you should first check which merge fields are available in Targeted Email for contact records of organization type. 

When I check the WYSIYG editor in targeted email, I find “Organization Contact Common Name” and “Organization Contact Formal Name” (these are Organization Contact record type fields) and I also see “Salutation” but I don’t see the option to choose Formal Salutation in the contact fields. I also don’t see salutation as an available field when editing an organization contact record, so that field might just refer to Person contacts.

The caveat I would see by using Organization Contact Common Name to populate with “Jane Doe, Grants Manager” would be that you wouldn’t then have two fields for what they’re intended for, like this organization for example:

Formal Name: The Hospital for Sick Children

Common Name: SickKids

Anyway, I think Custom Contact Fields would allow you to include the information you want like name and title without repurposing fields that might have value in other ways. If there are two contact people you could make the name be “Jane Doe and John Smith” for the custom field for contact name. But if there are more than two, I would instead recommend just creating Person contact records and linking them via relationship to the organization using Employee/Employer. 

And/but: I actually recommend creating a Person Contact and linking the grants manager as the primary contact. I know you said you didn’t want to do that and probably have a good reason, but for a lot of downstream impact reasons (too much to go into in this post but happy to discuss if you want to) I would recommend using the Person Contact as intended out of the box. 

Thanks for this response.

In our old system we were able to make child relationship records for this exact purpose. In this case, the person themselves is not a donor, they are merely the representative we deal with but the relationship is with the organization. Sometimes our contact person changes, that is why I am reluctant to make records for people who will never become donors. Of course, if we are able to inspire our contact to make a personal donation then we do create a record for them and link them to the organization. For example, the PTA of a local school makes an annual donation. The contact person changes every year. Rarely do they personally contribute as they make their donation through the school’s effort but I still need to mail them an acknowledgement.

I think your workaround of using a custom field might work. 
 

Do you know if it is possible to change the default template for the Acknowledgement by Batch report to include the fields we routinely use that are not already in the default template? It is very annoying to have to manually add the fields after every batch.

The batch acknowledgement report is just the Contribution Acknowledgement Report but clicking the shortcut from the financial batch will only show contributions in that batch. Is that the report you mean? 

If it is, then you can customize that report and make a new Saved Template to include the columns and filters you want. But you would need to run the saved template and choose the batch by using the filter, rather than clicking directly from the batch, since I believe it will default to the default report template, not the saved one.