We have only received two gifts in three years that are sent in memory or honor of someone. It would not be cost effective to purchase RE:Tribute to handle these gifts. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to enter and be able to track these gifts?

We use a combination of Gift Subtype - Tribute or Memorial and Gift Attributes for the Name, Address,etc. You can export the attributes directly into an acknowledgment so it works okay.

Email me if you need more info. Melissa S. Graves
Manager, Development Database & Direct Mail
Planned Parenthood of Connecticut
[Email Removed]
203-752-2804

Melissa, Thank you so much for your quick response. Sounds like it will work. Thanks again,

We also have only a modest number of these (a couple of dozen a year). We have created a gift subtype of Tribute (actually, we have 2, one for restricted and one for unrestricted). We also identify these as being in response to an appeal called TRIBUTE.

If the donor is local, we enter the gift directly on their record (as a public library we are dealing almost exclusively with local donors). If they are "from away" and sending in something in memory of an old classmate, relative, or whatever, we use a generic constituent record we have created called Mr. Tribute Gift. We identify the donor in the Reference field on the gift record.

In both cases, we also list the tributee in the Reference field so we can sort these out.

I wil admit that this works for us only because we are not generating acknowledgements to either the donor or the honoree/family through Raiser's Edge. A member of our volunteer auxiliary prepares these by hand using pre-printed acknowledgement cards and filling in appropriate details.

If we did lots more of these, I would want to look into RE:tribute, but it hasn't been worth the investment for us yet. Mary Rindfleisch
Ridgefield (CT) Library

We also receive in memoriam and in tribute donations and do not have RE: Tribute. I am curious - what is the reason for using the gift subtype - I just assign the appropriate appeal and then in gift attribute I assign the name of the deceased since we include that in the thank you letter. Thanks. It is always good to hear how others are processing and tracking gifts. Cheers, Ann

A couple of reasons come to mind why gift subtype works for us. 1) it is easy to see right from the gift tab that it is a tribute gift (we do not use tribute or memorial as an appeal unless we actually solicited the gift ourselves). 2) it is easy to query on (querying on attributes with text fields is less precise) We also keep in the attributes the tribute donor address and for memorials the contact person and address for notification. We are getting more and more Trib/Mem gifts and I am working on getting the Module. Melissa S. Graves Manager, Development Database & Direct Mail Planned Parenthood of Connecticut [Email Removed] 203-752-2804

I inherited the gift subtypes situation from the person who set up our system originally. He was great with IT but had less understanding of the appeal/fund/campaign structure and did not set up many appeal types. I added this so I could more easily align my figures with those the bookkeeper generates, but I have continued to use the gift subtype for new tributes so we can look at history without going back and changing what was done in previous years. Mary Rindfleisch Ridgefield (CT) Library

We use gift attributes for Honoree and for Honor Reason.  Honoree pulls from constituents.  We then also make sure we setup a relationship between the Donor and the Honoreee.

My problem is I want to send letters to the Honorees and can't figure out how to do that.  If I pull a gift query, I can export out the Honoree but can't get that person's bio/address info.  If I pull constituents (who have the relationship) I don't see gifts on their record.

Thinking of Soft Crediting Honoree with a ZERO dollar amount but then that might lead to other problems.

 No sure how to do this.  Even If I queried on constituents with the relationship (to get he honoree) I don't have the gift information for them.  And more than one person could have that relationship to the Honoree so I wouldn't know which one.

Any thoughts?

Hi Howard,

We don't have the tribute module, and we process between 50 and 200 memorial/in honor of gifts a year. We created an appeal type Memory/honor of, use the memorial and In honor of tables to create a query for a Family Notificiation letter through RE Mail. We have to manually update the address and salutation from the donor to the family member/honoree, but it is managable with the small number we process annually. If we get to the point of processing more I'll propbably add a relationship to the donor record using a specific relationship type IMO or IHO comes to mind.

Hope this helps.

Karen

I had the same problem and spent what seemed like hours on the phone with Customer Support and never came up with a good solution. So I created a "work around" which isn't perfect, but does the job for me. On the record of the Honoree, I use the Attribute Tab to record the information I need to create the letter. I then Query on this information and export to an Excel spreadsheet and do a mail merge with Microsoft Word to create the letters. Here's what I do: I created an Attribute Category of "Mailing", with "Description" a drop down table with "in honor of" or "in memory of" choices. "Date" is the date of the gift. In comments I type the name of the donor followed by either "in your honor" or or "in memory of XXX" for a memorial gift. (Be careful though, because I believe you can only use a certain amount of characters in Comments) I created a Query to use for these Attributes and I export the query to an Excel spreadsheet. (Note - I do not use RE:Export) For Query Criteria I have Constituent Specific Mailing Description one of in memory, in honor of. For the Output I have Primary Addressee (This is the Honoree), Constituent Specific Attributes Mailing Comments, the address of the Honoree and Primary Salutation for the Honoree. Once I export to Excel, (I am outside of RE now and working directly on my desktop PC) I use the spreadsheet as my data source and do a mail merge with Microsoft Word. It sounds complicated, but once set up it works well. We don't do a high volume of these type of gifts, so it isn't an extreme burden to run letters this way. You must have a mail merge letter set up with the wording and the merge fields to start. When you get to the final step in Word mail merge, "Edit Letters", you can fine tune any wording before you print them. Run envelopes the same way and you're done!

When I had a system without Tribute I too had to create attributes for everything - including each address element - in order to produce letters automatically. So even if multiple people give to the same tribute I was re-entering the acknowledgee information over and over again on each gift.

This was the way I was able to justify the Tribute module... :)