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