Add support for Japanese and other non-English alphabets

Learned that BlackBaud doesn't support non-English alphabets recently when we received a donation from a donor in Japan. The donor record that was created for them shows their name as “?? ??”. I contacted support and was told that no non-English alphabets are currently supported; their advice to me was "to ask the client to provide their name with the normal US language characters or keep it as is with the question marks." BlackBaud should add support for non-English alphabet characters since not all donors will have a name using English alphabet characters and there is no way to do exports, mail, etc. from the database or webview using this person's actual name.

  • Alex Day
  • Dec 26 2023
Constituents
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  • Keleigh Allen commented
    02 Jan 17:46

    I would highly encourage support for all alphabets. We are seeing an increase in students and parents from a wide variety of countries and they will not all have an "English" name nor mailing addresses with all English characters.

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  • Rachel Parker commented
    01 Jan 16:29

    We need support for some Spanish characters - I can add them accurately within the database - but on the gift receipts etc, they do not show up correctly. ñ õ etc.

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  • Austen Brown commented
    December 29, 2023 15:47

    I saw a question on a forum a few weeks ago asking how to store Chinese characters within RE. This is definitely something folks are looking for and BB should consider supporting.

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  • Christine Robertson commented
    December 27, 2023 18:57

    There is some support for European characters in (I believe in the US and UK databases), but I have not seen Japanese characters (or a wide host of other characters) work in the system.

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