We are curious how other organizations manage "In Memory Of" and "In Honor Of" gifts. We currently soft credit them to the honoree and use an "Honor/Memorial" appeal. Even with the dedicated appeal it is sometimes tricky to pull accurate total giving for the creditee so we are considering doing away with the IMO/IHO soft crediting and just adding a note to the contribution who the gift is in honor of. Before making any changes we are wondering how other organizations manage their IMO/IHO gifts, specifically if you use soft credits or not. Thanks.
At Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, we book all of our honor and memorial gifts to the Miscellaneous appeal, with individual sources created for each honoree or person being memorialized. Each gift gets a designation as a memorial gift of an honor gift. We don't soft credit the honoree.
At Shubert Theatre we don't soft-credit them or use a special appeal. We really only use the honor/memorial information for playbills, so we just include it in their playbill listing ex: "Jane Smith in memory of John Smith." so when we export the info for the playbill it automatically pulls through. If they give again later without the memorial we just update the playbill listing.
I previously worked for an org that soft credited tribute gifts, and for the same reason you list - reporting issues - I didn't care for it. I also didn't care for it because when looking at the Contributions tab it was harder to see their actual giving. For memorial gifts it was a little frustrating, too, as you have to activate/inactivate their record in order to apply the soft credit. However, what I *did* like about it was that it was very clear who was inspiring gifts. My current org is more simple - I code the gift to our tribute specific fund/campaign and use a tribute appeal/source. There are special instances where we do code these to our standard annual fund/campaign if it's clearly a renewal and not a one-time gift. I include all of the tribute info in the notes of the gift, and we have a special Tribute field added to the Custom Data tab. With all of that info I'm able to quickly identify the tribute gifts for recognition purposes. The only thing I don't like about this is that nothing shows up on the record of the person who inspired the gift. I've toyed around with the thought of adding a Plan Step for them, but I currently don't have capacity to add more steps to my gift entry process.