Except in unusual cases I tend to mail (snail mail) one piece per Account. So if I'm mailing an appeal or a membership renewal, I need to mail one piece per household (one per Account). In some cases, the mailing needs to go to both organization AND household accounts. That argues for an Account-based report to pull my list. But if I use an Accounts report, I can't add those records to a Campaign to help me manage my lists, pull followup mailings, etc.
In standard SF systems, I've used Contact Roles for this purpose such that my system would generate a single "primary" contact role for each Account and ensure that there was always no more than one per Account. Where there were no Contacts in an Account, I could create a dummy Contact that would be the primary and would allow me to "add" even that Account to the campaign and include them in the mailing. My mail merge fields were Account fields (things like formal and informal greeting, etc) so I didn't need to have a real name in the Contact. In fact, the ONLY reason for the Contact was to allow me to include those Accounts in campaigns.
What's more, I want ONLY one record per Account, and the "primary" contact role could be used to ensure that's what I got. Filter for Primary = TRUE in the Contact role and, voilla, I have one record per Account that INCLUDES Contacts that can be added to a Campaign. Worked perfectly.
So, is there a similar approach to pulling Account mailing lists to add them to a Campaign? I thought by ensuring I assigned Primary Contacts to every Account I'd be able to use that assignment or Affiliations to help me, but no luck yet.
I've tried Accounts with Affiliations and Contacts but that doesn't give me what i need and is quite confusing given the relationships involved. So far I've mailed without being able to add campaign members, but that's not really OK.
Thanks @Anne Young No answers to this question? Let me re-state the question in case my original was too confusing.
I'm looking for a way to be able to pull a mailing list such that I have all Accounts and the SINGLE primary contact for that Account (must show the Contact record and it's fields). I need ONE Contact per Account (and therefore only one record per Account so no Account shows up on multiple lines).
I need Contacts in this report so I can manage them through a Campaign. Every Account will have a Primary Contact designated. Hence, I need a report that will have the Account with it's Primary Contact.
