Trying to come up with a standard process of entering tribute donations into RaisersEdge but our organization did NOT purchase the tribute module.  I've already set up a query to search the gift reference field for Tribute: (name here) but if there is a more standardized version someone else has come up with (less typo friendly) I would love to hear about it.

Thanks!

 - Tricia

We do not have the tribute module either.  Is your question on ways to deal with who the tribute is in reference to? Depending on the amount of activity we've approached it several ways.  We used to use the reference field but format consistency was difficult and was afraid of missing someone. 

When we knew we would have a lot of gifts, we set up a specific fund under our memorial campaign.  For finance the GL #s put the money where it was designated.  All gifts were entered under this memorial fund.  I've also used an appeal if gifts are for an established fund.  A query on the fund or appeal gifts would allow a global add or change of your tribute information.

I have an addressee named 'recognition for XYZ fund.' For general most gifts, I popluate this field with donor's name.  For tributes/memorials/honorariums, I mark is editable and enter how the gift will be listed (ex. In honor of John Brown).  Unfortunately it still requires manual entry of tribute name.  We pull this addressee list when working on our donor recognitions.  (To get around the lack of addressee for organizations, I used someone's suggestion from the forums and created an Alias type of 'recognition for XYZ fund'.  When I run the query, I pull these two lists, export to excel and copy/join the addressee and alias fields for a complete list.)

You can pull the addressee field into a your batch with a default if you are entering a group at a time.  That would work really well for a number of tributes all with same name.

Maybe there will be some other great ideas still to come...  Good luck

 I am not sure if I am reading your question correctly so not sure if our example applies. We also do not have the tribute module. For such gifts we have a gift attribute "Honor/Memorial" and a table populated with the name of the person being memorialized or honored. We used to also put the name in the reference field but I  do not like that becasue it is free text. We are small enough that a table works for us.

Good luck.

 Thanks so much to both of you fr your responses!  This is definitely a "look and see" type deal for us but we seem to have found a compromise.

We are going to use a Reference Field in the batch for tributes - however we have a master list and on that list, we have assigned the tribute a number - ie: 1T ... this way we lose most of the possibility of typos in names, etc...

 Again, THANK YOU!!!!

 - t.