Memorial Gift Tracking and Fundraising

Hello Debra! I wanted to provide a few tips on this question. 

It’s common to use the contribution custom fields, a designation value, and the creditee functionality (including one or more dedicated creditee types) to support a memorial gift program.

The contribution custom fields are a simple place to record a “given in memory of” name that can appear on the donor’s receipt. This is useful when you don’t have enough information to create a full constituent record about the memorialized person.

A designation value like “Memorial Gift” is a highly reportable field that helps you measure the total amount of money in this program in the Fund Activity Report, Analytics, and elsewhere. Unless you are required to restrict the money in the general ledger, we would not recommend creating a fund for memorial gifts.

The creditee functionality, using one or more dedicated creditee types, creates a link between the donor’s gift and the memorialized person (assuming you have enough information to create a constituent record):

• All credited gifts will show on the creditee’s record (with a different notation and highlighting)
• Credited gifts can be reported on in reports like the Current Constituent Giving by List report and queried in List Manager
• Creditee types can trigger acknowledgments, letting you send creditee letters like “A gift was made by X in memory of…” to the person’s estate (separate from/in addition to the donor’s own acknowledgment)

To the part of your question asking about soliciting repeat memorial gifts, the Plans functionality is of course the correct tool to track solicitation efforts and leave yourself a reminder to revisit this donor for next year’s gift. Using relationships (associations and affiliations) can also help document the connections between donors and their loved ones for research and solicitation purposes.

I hope that gives you some starting points!

-Michael

Thank you very much, Michael.  I appreciate the detailed response, especially on the credited functionality.  

Thank you very much, Michael.  I appreciate the detailed response, especially on the credited functionality.