Memorial & Honorary Gifts
How do you handle Memory and Honorary Gifts? How do you handle the letters sent to the person/their respective family?
The simple way: One donation in the donor’s record
Create one donation record and add it to the actual donor’s account. Record the information of the donation and the name/contact info of the person the donation was made in memory/honor of in the actual donation record. Finally, generate two letters for these donations before you mark it as acknowledged. One for the donor, one for the memory/honor family.
If you wish to send a letter to the family or the person in honor of, then you’ll need to add user defined fields to the Donation tab to do so. At a minimum you should add a multiple line text field for the address of the person. The name should go in the Comments field if you want to include it in Contribution Statements, so you do not need a field for the name. (Adding user defined fields.)
There is a standard Donation Type of “Memorial,” but there isn’t a standard “Honorary” donation type. So if you want to use that designation, you will need to add it. Add it under Maintenance > Site Setup > Field & Screen Customization > DonorSnap Site Lookups > DonationType
Enter the donation as usual in the actual donor’s record. Record the name of the In Memory/Honor Of person in the Comments field.
Use a specific Batch Code (the type of Thank you Letter sent to the donor) for “Memorial/Honorary” that pulls in the comments (the name of the person). Remember you must build your mail-merged letters in Microsoft Word before uploading in to DonorSnap, and you can include the comments and user defined fields for address, etc. in the letters.
DonorSnap will send a Thank You to the actual Donor, but you may need to send a letter to the family letting them know of the gift. The easiest way is to create a letter using the fields you added to your Donation Tab. So as you add that donation record, you put in the name and address of the family recipient to receive the notification (note this will be a second letter you are sending out).
When you run your acknowledgement letters, you will need to generate the letters to the donor and the family/person in memory/honor of before you mark the donation as acknowledged.
Example Letter to the Donor: Download Word Doc
Example Letter to the Family/Honoree: Download Word Doc
(Note: These letters use user defined fields that you may not have in your site. Make sure to use the appropriate field names for your scenario.)
This method will not allow sending an email acknowledgement to the family/honoree using the Email PDF Acknowledgement tool.
The more complex way: Two donations, one for the donor and one “Soft Credit”
Some organizations will go so far to create a new contact record for the family of the Memorial/Honorary person. If you have the contact in DonorSnap already, or if you want to keep that address on file for later uses for Appeals and other mailings, this could be a good route to go!
In that case you need to add a subsequent donation to that memorial/honoree Contact’s record as a Soft Credit, which would trigger a Thank You letter sent to that contact. For a family, you may need to change the contact name to Family of [memorial name].
If you wish to use the Email PDF Acknowledgement system to send an email to the family/honoree, then you must use this method.