Segmenting your database by Gender is now very easy

The segmentation of your database is key for better communication with your constituents. A common segmentation process is to organize your contacts by gender (Female/Male). Let's say you are hosting a Women in Business luncheon where only women can attend the event. In this case, you want to make sure you send the invitation for this event only to the female contacts of your database. But what a hassle to manually update the Gender field for all your contacts! There is a solution.

As part of our monthly contribution to the CiviCRM project, Cividesk is happy to announce the availability of a new feature in their extension Cividesk Normalize. The Gender field recorded with the "Individual" contact type can now be automatically updated based on the prefix used for the individual. You no longer need to update this field manually!

The CiviCRM extension "Cividesk Normalize" saves your data to the database in the specific format. This normalization happens behind the scenes when you enter a contact in the back-end or when a contact is created via a public form such as an event registration or a membership sign up page as well as with data imports.

When the contact is saved in the database, the first, middle, last and company names, phone numbers, and addresses including zip codes will be formatted according to the settings configured in the extension such as (but not limited to):

- Capitalize first letter of each word in all names
- Capitalize organization names and individual last names
- Normalize phone numbers
- Capitalize Street Address
- Capitalize city names
- Normalize zip codes

This new feature automatically updates the Gender field with the value "Female" if the prefix is Mrs. or Ms. and with the value "Male" if the prefix is Mr. Of course, as not everybody needs this feature, we have added a configurable setting in the extension that can be enabled or disabled as needed. Just another way to customize your CiviCRM!