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
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.