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
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.