Hi, everyone -
I'm curious about how other organizations handle memorial gifts. For a while we were entering these on the donor's account with a soft credit to the account of a surviving spouse or family member, which worked beautifully for acknowledgments, but we stopped doing the soft credit because of the clutter and confusion it created on the creditee's contribution history and membership record. (Not such a problem if we're talking about one or two gifts, but in some cases we receive dozens.) Current practice is a straight gift on the donor's account, with a note that includes information about who to send the family notification to. This keeps the records cleaner, but you lose the advantages of the soft credit for acknowledging and tracking. I'm not quite satisfied either way.
So... does anyone have a better way of handling these? What brilliant solution am I missing??
Thanks in advance for any and all ideas!
Sarah
Sarah,
We do not soft credit these gifts either. We have one Appeal called "FY11 Memorial/Honor Gifts" and we create new sources within that appeal for each honoree.
So if a gift comes in and it is in honor of or in memorial of Jane Smith. We create an outside source called "Jane Smith" and gifts get put to that source.
We also add a note in the gift that shows in the ack report indicating how the gift should be acknowledged.
We get so few of these its not really an issue.
If you did want to link the donor to the honoree, I would suggest creating a new association type and linking them that way. That's never been something we have needed here but it would be a good thing to do.Dale
This doesn’t come up very often for us either, but this is what we came up with:
We enter the contribution on the donor’s record and assign membership benefits to the deceased patron’s record. We also enter a note on the contribution.
We add a Program/Playbill name using the “In Memory Of …” format on the deceased patron’s record. The “In Memory Of …” listing will appear in the playbill at the level appropriate for the aggregate of memorial gifts.
We also create an association between the two records.
We do basically the same here. We create a new source for each honoree under an ongoing "Endowment" campaign and appeal. The gift is entered on the donor's account with a soft credit to the honoree (and yes, we create a new account for the deceased if necessary), an honor/memorial designation, and in the note section record something like "In Memory of Mr X (id#) from Jim (id#)" with any special instructions for the person who sending the acknowledgment. This particular campaign isn't tied to any memberships.
We don't get them all that often, but when we do there's usually dozens for a particular person.
Hi Sarah,
We enter the gift in the donor's account with a source that lists the honor (such as Doe, John 75th birthday) and also note in the custom tab who is being honored. We do not soft credit or extend membership benefits to the tributee. Instead we add a hard association (when possible) with an enddate and have the following recipricol association types:
Tributee-Hon and Tributor-Hon
Tributee-Mem and Tributor-Mem
This assists us when we get a lot of gifts for one person and want to notify the family of the donors who gave in memory or honor; it also makes it easier to look at an account to see a history of hon/mem gifts.
T.C.