Hello all,

I'm hoping you can give me some help with tracking memorial gifts without the tribute module.  We don't get many but we were just informed that we should expect many for a constituent that recently passed away.  I haven't had to worry about this much because there have been so few since I started.  What would be the best way to track these as they come in?  In the past, a record has been created for the deceased individual and the memorial gifts soft-credited to the record.  Is there a better way?  I put an annotation on the record with who to notify of the gifts.  I can't help but think that there are other ways to track these.  We are also in the will and expect an estate gift eventually.  Wouldn't it be better to keep his exisiting record with the history of his personal donations, the soft credits of the memorial gifts, and the estate gifts?  Please let me know how others are handling these situations.  Thanks!

We have a gift attribute category of Honor/Memorial and we enter the honoree's name in the a table for description. When it is time to report I run a gift query to find gifts where the attibute description matches. By using a table for the name I avoid the problem of the name being mis-spelled. I imagine this might be cumbersome if you ahve a lot of memorials but we don't and this has worked fine.

 We have two Gift Attributes: "In Honor of" and "In Memory of." When we post the gift honor/memory we put the name of the honoree in the Description field. You can then run queries on the attribute...

I like the suggestion of using a gift attribute especially with the table for consistent, correct data entry.  As Katrina said, volume may determine what works best for you.  We don't have the tribute module either. 

I have a constituent who gives to our annual campaign whenever a friend dies.  For these, I record as any other gift to annual campaign but add In Memory - XXXXX in the reference field.  We have an addressee field for how name is to appear on annual campaign recognition list so I also add "In Memory - XXXX for this field also.  This is typically the only gift I have in this person's memory.

When the son of a board member/local bank president died and we knew there would be a large number of gifts we created a separate fund for the gifts.  This was right after we started running RE.  It didn't hurt record keeping in anyway, reported out easily but probably wasn't the best option.  Now the fund is inactive and it worked for us.  So, we created a fund again last year when long time Y member and local newspaper editor died.  It works. 

Without the tribute module, it's a bit of trial and error.