Handling deceased donor records

Hi Kerry thanks for your question, it could be useful to cross-post this to the new Fundraising & Development community group? Hopefully you'll receive a reply over there.

- Gill Tasker, Community Manager

Hi Kerry,

If you are still waiting for payments from the estate, I would leave the record active. That just makes it easier to find them when you need to. I change other things to indicate that the person has passed away. Some things that I think work well for situations like this are update the status of the individual who has passed to "Deceased". We have a "Date of Death" Attribute that I use to suppress them from receiving mail or email from us. And, if you use the "Planned Giving " area of the History tab, don't forget to update this with pertinent details. Once their gift is complete, then we inactivate them. 

I'm sure that others have a process different from this, but this has worked well for me.

Jenny

Hi Kelly,
We create a new constituent record called "The Estate of Insert Name" and add it as a relationship to the deceased constituent record before that record is inactivated. We use Plans to manage bequests and have a prospect campaign called "Bequest Plans" for managing any conversations/interactions during the constituent's lifetime regarding leaving a gift in their will. Therefore, another step we do before inactivating the constituent's record is to link the new "The Estate of" record to the plan by making them an Associate within it. That way we can still easily see the history/valuable information in this plan from the new constituent record.
We have another live campaign for received bequests and we create a plan on "The Estate of" record using this campaign type. All information relating to interactions with administration of the estate lives here and the gift itself when it is received is processed on this record. If we thought we may have been in the will but it wasn't confirmed and turned out that we were not, we would still follow this process and just move the plan to a status that reflected no gift being received with any relevant notes/correspondence. 

Thanks for the suggestion. Sounds like a good process.

I like the detail. Thanks for the suggestion!