We have a process for sending donor's information to people they want notified of their gift to an honor/memorial.  We are looking at a process to send the names and addresses of all donors of gifts to an honor/memorial, to acknowledgees who might want to write thank yous, or whatever.  The how is not a problem, using the Tribute module that we have, but one of the directors raised the question of whether we could/should release the names unless we are specifically asked to do so.  Of course, we never include amounts, but as we discussed the issue, we wondered if the donors to the honor/memorial would consider sending the information a breach of their confidentiality.

 So, my question: has anyone ever had problems with providing information on donors to an acknowledgee designated for a tribute?  It seems to me that this practice is probably well accepted, but we would like to know if it has caused anyone else a lot of problems.

If you notify acknowledgees in this way and have had no problems, drop a quick response as well as those with war stories.  That will help us get a read on whether we would be _likely_ to have issues with angry donors.

Thanks for your input!

We send the info on to an acknowledgee and have not had a problem.  The donor knows that we do so as our thank you/receipt to the donor states we have notified the family/appropriate party of their honor/memorial gift.  Have never had any issues raised.

We also send info on to the acknowledgee and include a statement to the donor that his or her name has been passed along and have never had negative feedback.  The only time we would not send the name, of course, is that if the gift is made anonymously.

I have always provided the name and address of the donors to the acknowledgee(s) unless the gift was anonymous.  Even when I worked for Planned Parenthood we would get "tribute" gifts in the name of George W. Bush (some, I believe, were from former Yale classmates) who, I believe would not be a PP supporter, and we sent letters to the White House.

We have a lot of honor/memorials and we pass the name and address of the donor on to family members.  Many of the family members choose to also send thank yous to the donors. We do not include individual dollar amounts.  However, we have had some Emeritus Faculty members who died (4 this year) who have Endowments. After the donations stop coming in, we send a letter to the family telling them the total amount received towards the endowment/scholarship in memory of...

Notifying a family member or other immediate members has always been our practice and has always been well received.  Some are pleasantly surprised. 

We also don't share amounts but do share names if asked, although it didn't occur to us to include that fact in the thank you letter. What a great idea!

We also share totals raised because folks making gifts through our program are doing so to purchase a tree or bench for a park (as a tribute), and often want to make up the difference or just know how close they are to their goal.

Jenn

Seattle Parks Foundation

Our tribute donors expect us to send their info to the acknowledgees - they consider it a "service" that we provide. On the rare occasion that a donor requests their name not be sent, we honor that.

I agree with all the previous comments, though I'd like to add that, when I was with a previous employer, we'd occasionally get a donation "in honor of Joe" and we'd have no idea who "Joe" was and no idea how to notify him somebody made a donation in his honor. In this case, we would send our usual notification card along with the standard thank you to the donor, allowing them to send the notification to "Joe" if they wanted to.

If we get a donation "in honor of Joe" we omit the statment that Joe will be notified.  We do not send donors our blank notification cards. 

At a previous organization a particular donor sent in $100 and asked for 30 notification cards which they would send out themselves throughout the year.  Then more when they ran out.  We put a stop to that practice.