Tribute Gifts are in a class by themselves when it comes to fundraising. They can require a bit more management than "general" gifts, but they can also offer you the opportunity to acquire new donors that might otherwise not be involved with your organization. They also offer existing donors the opportunity to show their respects by giving to a cause they already deem worthy.
Tributes can be made for people or pets, a fact to which many animal-oriented nonprofits will attest. Tributes to the living are the "in honor of" kinds of gifts, while tributes to the deceased are the "in memory of" gifts. "In honor" of gifts may be motivated by an event such as a wedding, anniversary, birthday, graduation, or other important moment for congratulations.
For each tribute, you will need to keep track of three categories of people--
- donor, who gives the gift.
- honoree, who is being honored or memorialized 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 close friend. In addition, there may be more than one person in this category.
The person being honored may not be one of your donors or prospects, and so may not exist in your database. The person being notified of a memorial gift may not exist in your database, either.
In FundRaiser Select and Professional
The Tributes Module allows you the control and record-keeping needed for these special gifts. A list of people being honored or memorialized is kept in the Windows | Tributes section of the program. You can fill out a tribute listing "in advance" for those times when someone has requested that donations be made to your organization in lieu of flowers, as an example. It can also be accessed "on the fly" when entering a new gift, just by clicking on the Tributes button on the Gift’s "Edit" page. In this area, you list who the person is, and whether it is an in "honor" or "memory" tribute. You also list to whom you want notification sent when any gifts are given as a tribute to this person. Along with the notification person’s name, of course, you list the address, and can also store phone number, relationship to the honoree, which letter template you want to use for the notification, and more.
Next week, I'll write more about the technical side of handling tribute gifts in FundRaiser. This article is adapted from the original by Larry Weaver published in September 2015
If you'd like to learn more about managing tribute gifts in FundRaiser, Read about the FundRaiser Tributes Module here