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.
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.