FundRaiser Blog
3 Mother's Day Suggestions for FundRaiser Users
Non-traditional ways to honor mothers
Mother's Day was begun, back in the early 1900's, as a celebration of the person to whom we owe our very existence, but quickly became so commercialized that even the originator of the day became disenfranchised with it. If we want to truly celebrate our mothers, we can do better than giving flowers or a dinner out, I think, and FundRaiser can be a part of that effort.
Tributes Module
FundRaiser recently got an upgrade to the Tributes module, in that there is now an "In Celebration of" tribute type, in addition to the usual "In Honor of", and "In Memory of" tributes. You might consider an effort to solicit donations "In Celebration of Mother's Day", as an alternative to the gifts, cards, dinners, flowers, etc. A donation to (your worthy cause here) can be a loving tribute that lasts longer that it takes to read a card, eat a dinner, or for those flowers to wilt. Using the Tributes Module (optional in Select, standard in Professional) will let you easily track these types of donations, create lists of tribute donors for newsletters, as well as send appropriate correspondence to donors AND to the mothers they are honoring in this way. If you don't yet have the module, you can learn more about it here.
Households
FundRaiser's Households feature (Select and Professional) allows you to have households made up of multiple name records. This can be helpful in tracking multi-generational households, and in tracking individuals separately within their households (volunteerism, separate donations, separate coding, etc.). Households can allow you to more specifically target your correspondence, too, since you can make groupings that take household status into account. So, for instance, if you want to directly address just males, or just females, you can do that, individually and separately. Maybe you want to send a quick email to all the males, individually, to remember their household "moms", whether mother or spouse, with a donation to their favorite non-profit. If you aren't familiar with Households, take a few minutes to view the training video in the Customer Portal section of our website.
Coding & Spare Fields
Even without Tributes or Households (read: FundRaiser Spark), there are ways to keep track of some relationships by using Codes and Spare Fields. Remember that codes are nothing more than unique identifiers, so you can categorize someone as a parent, and/or a child, and/or a grandparent, and/or a sibling, etc. You can use a spare field or two (or three) for names of relatives, or, if you want to focus on Mother's Day, you might have one with the name(s) of the donor's mother(s) in a spare field. Remember that you can use spare field contents in correspondence; they can be merged into letters, in other words. So, even without the Tributes module, or Households, you could send a letter or email suggesting a gift "to honor (spare field merged here)". Learn more about coding and spare fields in our Customer Portal training area, or by signing up for a live class by using the training calendar.
Take a look at how FundRaiser can help you with fundraising communications for Mother's Day and other special occasions
