HiWhen you receive a tribute gift (either honor or memorial) do you send a letter to both the donor and the honoree or family of the deceased? If so, what information do you include? Do you specifically ask the donor for permission to send a card to the honoree/family? For years, in addition to sending an acknowledgment letter to the donor, we have been automatically sending a card to the honoree/family that includes the donor's name and contact information. Given privacy concerns, we are re-evaluating if this is the best practice and would like to hear how others are handling this.ThanksJess LevySan Francisco Opera415-551-6319
In addition to a letter of acknowledgement to the donor, we send a letter to the honoree/family notifying them that we received a gift in their loved one's honor/memory. We inform the family that we sent a letter of acknowledgement on behalf of the organization, and we provide them only the name and address of the donor in case they wish to also send a word of thanks.
I find that our small community expects to learn of such gifts, so I am curious about what is leading you to reconsider. Would love to learn more, if you can share.
Mary-Ellen
I was in the same situation a few days ago! A lot of the times, the family of the deceased will make a tribute gift in honor of their loved ones. On top of sending the acknowledgement, we email the donor if they (or someone else) would like to receive the card. Out of courtesy we ask first through email or phone, but privacy wise it helped that the patron had the same last names and address. I think in this case I would hold off on automatically sending with contact details unless the donor specially requested otherwise.
We send an acknowledgement letter to the donor, letting them know we will inform the honoree, or the family of the deceased, of their gift. We also send a notification letter to the honoree or family of deceased, informing of the gift and the name of the donor but do not share any other contact details.
Our concern is more around how much information we share with the honoree/family and if it is still appropriate to send contact information without the donor's explicit consent.
We do the same as Kieley with a letter to the donor notifying them we will send a letter to the honoree or family. That letter contains names and any personal notes the donor asked to be included, but not contact details. If we expect a couple or more gifts in memory, we will hold the letter to the family for a couple weeks so that we can send one letter with all the names.
For online memorial or honor gifts, I set up our TNEW contribution page with a checkbox that asked if the donor wanted us to send a letter to the honoree or family. There were also fields for the honoree's address and any personal notes the donor wanted us to include. So for online gifts at least, we sought explicit permission to send a letter.