Hi All,
I'm wondering how other organizations handle records where there are no living persons on the record, all planned giving is resolved, but they receive tributes for years after. For example, we have one record where A1 and A2 have been deceased since 2007 but they receive a tribute gift every couple of years none of which have been less than $1000. So far we have left their record active with both marked deceased, and of course we have blocks in place so we don't accidentally send them anything, but they fall into lists and reports in ways that kind of muddy the numbers so that made me wonder if anyone has a different way of handling this?
Jenny
Hello Jenny, I'm always curious to learn how others handle tribute gifts in general. Here at the Guthrie we don't currently use soft credits for any tribute gifts, they're only defined by their fund and source/appeal. We create custom source codes for specific individuals if we're receiving a lot of tribute gifts for them. The one benefit of doing it this way is that you can leave the deceased record inactive. The last organization I worked for, we used soft credits for tribute gifts. It was a bit tedious, but I preferred this method - whenever we had a tribute gift to enter, we would reactivate the account, enter the gift, then inactivate it again. The flaw in that is that it's too easy to forget to inactivate the record again once you're done, but we had controls in place where where I was the only one doing this and I trusted myself to get it correct 99% of the time at least.
I've often made new accounts specifically linked to the individual or family's Estate. That is the account through which gifts following someone's passing are processed and recognized and, while temporarily reactivated, the individual in question is added as a Primary Contact through Relationships. Relationship Type has been anything from Officer to Trustee, etc. The primary *active* account will, ideally, be the person or office to whom gift acknowledgment is sent (often a lawyer). Gifts made in Tribute of the Estate are soft credited to the Estate at the direction of the donor.