I just received a memorial donation that I don't quite know how to handle. The check was issued by the family and was accompanied by a listing of the contributors - about 30 people in total. I know legally the issuer of the check should receive the acknowledgement/tax receipt, but should I send thank you letters to all 30 donors? I should also note that all of the donors are out of our service area and most likely will never donate again. Is it worth my time and energy to manually input these donors? I don't even know the amount each donor contributed - all I could do is soft credit them to the original check with an unknown amount. Then again, would it be good protocol to cultivate future donations from the family - if we didn't send thank you letters to everyone, would the family know about it? They did take the time to give us the name and address of each donor. I'm at a loss - what would you do? Lori Del Nero Administrative Assistant VNA/Hospice of Monroe County East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania [Email Removed]

We get thie type of memorial donation. For accounting records, we book the check as from the family in memory of the person, so we can track. Then I divide the amount equally among all the donors in Raisers Edge if I have no other information on how much they gave. This way I can have addresses in RE and then send a thank you to all 30. We don't mention how much unless we know amounts for sure. I use the reference box and enter the person's name that the gift is in memory of so I can track all the gifts if I ever need to pull it up again, since we don't have the module for memorials. We also send a thank you to the family for facilitating the gift & let them know we have thanked all the donors. It promotes goodwill among all the donors, whether they donate again or not. You could ask the family how much each person gave, but it's a stressful time & they may not know, so that question is best asked at the time you receive the donation or they inquire about how to make it. Another way is to just book the entire amount as from the family of so and so in memory of the person and just thank them, but they gave you those names expecting you to thank them, so it's a courtesy they seem to expect.

We add all the donors and soft credit the amount to each with note in the reference line that it was a group gift. We thank the family for forwarding the gift in the amount of $xxx and let them know that we have thanked all the donors they listed. In the gift reference line I also put IMO then the deceased name so when we run a query for the annual report we can list all the donors names for memorial gifts and of course these donors would get the annual report with their names listed. If they are out of our service area and do not give again in the next year, we stop sending them mail, but sometimes they give a repeat memorial donation in following year(s) if the deceased was very involved with our agency.