Tribute Gifts (In Honor/In Memory/In Celebration)
Tribute gifts are in a class by themselves when it comes to fundraising. They give you the opportunity to acquire new donors that might otherwise not be involved with your organization, while offering existing donors the opportunity to show their respects by giving to a cause they already deem worthy. Tributes can be "in honor of", "in memory of", or "in celebration of" something, whether person, pet, event, or otherwise.
For each tribute gift we keep track of three categories of people:
- Donor, who give the gift.
- Honoree, who or what is being honored, memorialized, or celebrated with the gift
- Family members, or whoever should be notified that such a gift has been given. This is often the spouse of a deceased person, but may be another relative or friend.
In FundRaiser Select/Professional
The Tributes Module allows you the control and record-keeping needed for these special gifts. A list of people being honored is kept in the Windows | Tributes section of the program. It can be filled out in advance, or as required. It stores data on who the person is, what type of tribute it is, and to whom you want notification sent (if any) when gifts are given as a tribute to this person.
Notification Letters
Our users have emphasized how important it is to notify family members of the honoree promptly about memorials. A single letter can include any number of people who have sent gifts, ant it isn't intended that you send this letter more than once or twice. The person being notified will appreciate a couple of letters over the course of time that indicate 20 people have donated, for instance, but they may NOT feel the same if they receive 20 separated letters from you. Some users have solved the problem by sending out the first notification letter quickly by mail, and then using email after that. Either way, the Automated Correspondence for Tributes can help.
Special Features for Tribute Notification Letters
The word processor gives you special features, fields, and functions to be able to reference every aspect of a tributed when creating templates, whether they are used as Gift Thank You or Tribute Notification letters.
Newsletters
For newsletters and other publications, you can use the Tribute Listing report in the Print menu to show who has given a tribute to whom. You can limit this report in various ways and even send it to an RTF file to copy/paste into any other program you like.
For a more thorough examination of Tributes handling in FundRaiser, check out the full article, or users may want to check out the Tributes training video available through the customer login section of our website.