Allow Preferred Name to be used in the alumni directory at the directory-level view. | General Feature Requests

Allow Preferred Name to be used in the alumni directory at the directory-level view.

Harvey Kay

Allow Preferred Name to be used in the alumni directory at the directory-level view. Hundreds of our alumni go by their preferred name, and the current view only allows preferred name to follow after first and last name. It is clunky and will make finding specific alumni more difficult.

May 28, 2026

Elizabeth Babb ’82

Actually, the profile allows for Maiden Name or Nickname (which I think you are calling preferred name.) You can can't have both. I know this because my team did "change" the profile to show nickname, but then I "lost" maiden name, so we had to choose (and went with Maiden). At least a change was made such that if an alum searches by nickname in the Directory, it does work. (But it's not adequate because you search for "Liz" and you get me, but whe you click on my profile, it shows "Elizabeth".) One can also incorporate Nickname as an email merge field - this was also a welcome upgrade.
As an all girls school with close to 3,000 alums, we really need the PROFILE BANNER to show First Name, Nickname, Maiden Name and Married Name. The fact that nickname is only visible to admins is mind-boggling. We need to keep the end-user in mind!
We struggle quite a bit with alums changing their first names to reflect their nicknames in the profile banner and then this "first name" change gets synced back to RE/NXT and overwrites their "First Name" field! This is a big problem so of course, we don't allow auto syncing on "First Name" to RE/NXT anymore. 
I have had this request in for over a year. I believe I have it under "Nick name" to show in profile if you, Almabase, want to consolidate feature requests. This is a HIGH PRIORITY for us.