Is there a best practice for processing contributions from one person in honor or in memory of someone else? I see on the forums that some groups have built custom fields for this purpose. I also know that one can apply membership benefits in honor of a third party--but I'm not sure that would work in the case of "in memory of" someone.
Thanks!
Jesse Cohen
Director of Development and Communications
The Metroptolitan Opera Guild
We're also looking at this issue as we work on improving the way we acknowledge gifts in memory/in honor of someone.
Specifically, does anyone else send an acknowledgment to the honoree? If so, do you use Tessitura to accomplish this?
As far as recording the gifts, we currently set up a separate account for 'gifts in honor/memory of John Doe' and soft credit that account as an honoree. For a gift membership, we just soft credit the account of the person receiving the membership (gift membership is also a creditee type).
We enter honorarium/memorial gifts on the donor's account with the honoree or the family of the deceased as creditee. There are creditee types to fit this, and we also have HON and MEM sources.
We're using one of the fields on the standard custom data tab for Mem/Hon Name (the creditee, as named by the donor) and one for any special note the donor wished to include (one recent example: "In honor of your 50th wedding anniversary."). These are then plugged into the acknowledgment letters. We send one to the donor and one to the creditee. These are generated through Tessitura and output to Word templates. The creditee letter does not include the dollar amount, but lets them know that so-and-so has made a gift in their honor, and thanks them for inspiring this gift.
I should note that for us memberships are used as a way of tracking annual fund benefits and recognition, and are not something that is purchased or given separately from that. Mem/Hon gifts are usually too small to qualify a person for benefits and so that is not a factor in how we handle these.
We have creditee types for Honor/Memory and Gift Membership and they all affect the membership of the creditee.These also share an acknowledgement rule simply to keep them separate from the rest.We then use a "tribute" merge document that with a few alterations works well for each of these, we also send a personalized card/letter to the honoree or person receiving the gift membership.
I plan on adding a drop down custom field and the custom field info to our current custom acknowledgement report so that we can merge these creditee types into the acknowledgement to help reduce the amount of manual adjustments that need to be made.