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How to Enable Personal Pronouns: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1795656
Ensure a welcoming environment and build stronger relationships with your patrons by giving them space to (optionally, of course) help you know how to address them. If you aren't sure whether this feature is one you should use, check out our resources on maintaining a gender-inclusive database and this guest blog post about why it matters.
You can activate the Personal Pronouns feature on the Public Ticketing Site and in the Box Office, add the field to Donation Forms and Signup Forms, and display it on your Contact Page Layouts.
Activating this feature should take you around 15 minutes, depending on how many Contact page layouts and Donation Forms you have. Let's jump in!
Enable Personal Pronouns
Use the instructions outlined here to edit your Contact page layouts, and add the "Personal Pronouns" field where you'd like it to appear.
Be sure to add the PatronManager "Personal Pronouns" field, not the Salesforce "Pronouns" field.
You'll do this by flipping a switch in PatronTicket Settings. Here's how!
2.1. Head over to PatronTicket Settings
You can get there via the PatronTicket Hub as shown below, or by searching in the App Launcher (waffle).
2.2. Click "Edit"
2.3. Scroll down to Public Site Settings and check the box to "Enable Pronouns"
If you'd like, you can disable the optional "Salutation" field from here as well.
2.4. Save!
That's all there is to it! Now the optional Personal Pronouns field will appear on the Public Ticketing Site, in PatronPortal, and in PatronManager Box Office.
Now let's make sure your patrons have the option to specify their pronouns when giving online. Use the instructions here to edit your Donation Form(s) and add the "Personal Pronouns" Contact field.
You can leave the Sort Order blank - the field will automatically appear in the "Contact" section of the form, next to the name fields. You can relabel the field as you wish, but you can't change the location.
If you use a PatronManager Signup Form and you'd like patrons to be able to specify their pronouns when signing up for your email list or mailing list, use the instructions here to edit your Signup Form(s) and add the Personal Pronouns field.
If you're using an Emma signup form and want to map a custom pronouns field back to PatronManager, follow these steps:
- Set up a "Pronouns" text field in Emma using Emma's help documentation
- Add the "Personal Pronouns" field to your internal qualification form
- Map your new Emma field to the PatronManager "Personal Pronouns" field
Frequently Asked Questions
PatronManager uses a text field to collect personal pronouns to avoid excluding patrons whose identities are not reflected in the picklist value set.
While picklists are useful for data collection for the purpose of categorization and reporting, the primary purpose of collecting pronouns is to help you properly address your patrons. Personal pronouns are fundamentally variable and individualized.
Salesforce includes a "Pronouns" picklist field on the Contact Object, but this is not ideal since the options are limited to the values set on the picklist. That's why we created a text field instead - because the primary purpose of collecting pronouns is to help you properly address your patrons, not to categorize them on a report.
PatronManager offers the optional Personal Pronouns feature to help you build stronger relationships with your patrons. Empowering patrons to specify their pronouns is not a means of gathering demographic gender data.
If you're considering collecting gender data, we encourage you to think carefully about your business rationale for doing so, how it relates to your organization's overall diversity strategy, and how you will use and protect that data. Read more in our article on maintaining a gender-inclusive database.
When you qualify new Contacts in PatronManager, you'll see the Personal Pronouns field just like other Contact fields. When merging a new Contact to an existing record, you should typically keep the most recent information, just as with any other updates to a patron's details.
While you might choose to edit a qualified Contact record to correct obvious typos or move/remove text that definitely does not belong in the Personal Pronouns field, we always recommend against editing a patron's specified pronouns (just as you wouldn't edit how they spell their name).