FundSvcs Community

 View Only

  • 1.  Honorary and Memorial Notifications/Tributes Practices

    Posted 06-05-2023 12:10 PM

    Good afternoon, everyone.

    Looking for any information others might like to share as it relates to their honorary and memorial gift notifications program.  Specifically, what do you share and who at your organization does them (centrally?). I'm curious how other processes compare with ours.  I'm starting to feel like providing the address might be problematic although I know it's a common practice and an looking for some thoughts on that. We've recently had some questionable honorary gifts made that appeared to be driven by national politics.  We are a large public university with a decentralized advancement structure. Our tributes are transaction based, so the gift itself has to be tagged as hon/mem.  We provide the name and address of the donor, and where the gift was designated.  We process about 140K gifts annually and could produce anywhere from 100 - 250  tributes in a month.

    1) What information do you share in your tributes?

    3) Are your tributes automatically generated or manual?

    3) About how many tributes do you generate monthly; how many gifts do you process annually?  

    4) Anything else you'd like to share for the good of the group?

    Thanks so much for any information you can share!



    ------------------------------
    Susie Brown
    University of Illinois Foundation
    smbrown1@uif.uillinois.edu
    ------------------------------


  • 2.  RE: Honorary and Memorial Notifications/Tributes Practices

    Posted 06-07-2023 11:56 AM

    Hi Susie,

     

    Your question has me a bit concerned with our process now!

     

    1. We share the names and addresses of the donors who made the gifts in honor of the person or in memory of a family member as well as what fund the gift was directed to, we do not share the amount. If someone has opted to make a gift anonymously we state that a gift was made anonymously.
    2. The process of creating the tribute and adding it to the gift in our database is manual, but the process of creating the letter is automated.
    3. We receive a lot of tribute gifts BUT we do NOT mail letters for most of them, for example during our annual giving week we receive a lot of gifts in honor of family pets or in memory of family and friends with no addresses provided, also a lot of people setup recurring or installment gifts with tirbutes and we only send one letter the for the first payment and not for the subsequent payments, so here is our breakdown:

     

     

    I'd love to know if others are moving away with sharing donor addresses.

     

    Amanda

     

     

    Amanda L. Haney

    Director of Gift & Data Management

    Gift & Data Management

     

     

    University Advancement I Elliott Alumni Center I 9 Edgewood Rd I Durham, NH 03824

    Office: 603-862-2041 I amanda.haney@unh.edu

     

    CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE:  If you have received this email in error, please immediately notify the sender by e-mail at the address shown.  This e-mail transmission may contain confidential information.  This information is intended only for the use of the individual(s) or entity to whom it is intended even if addressed incorrectly.  Please delete it from your files if you are not the intended recipient.  Thank you for your compliance.

     

     

     




    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Honorary and Memorial Notifications/Tributes Practices

    Posted 06-07-2023 12:01 PM
    You should only provide donor names or addresses if you tell donors you will do that in advance. Typically organizations mention this as a default on their website or in the letter/receipt you send to the donor.

    John

    John H. Taylor
    Principal
    John H. Taylor Consulting, LLC
    2604 Sevier St.
    Durham, NC   27705
    919.816.5903 (cell/text)

    Serving the Advancement Community Since 1987





    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Honorary and Memorial Notifications/Tributes Practices

    Posted 06-08-2023 01:07 PM

    It's been a while since I've been at an organization that has done a lot of tributes, but when I did, we only shared the name and the address of the donor, unless the donor wanted to give anonymously.  We did not share the fund information generally, only upon request or if there was specific fund that had been requested by the family.  Generally, we've not had many people ask for it.  All of our tributes were manually generated.  We didn't process that many tributes, roughly around 20 or so per year.

    What I've found is that in regards to tributes, it's not necessarily about how many you have as much as who the person was and how well liked/connected they were.  We've all seen tributes with only 1 or 2 gifts attached, but we've also seen some with 100 times as many.



    ------------------------------
    Dariel Dixon
    Chautauqua Institution
    ddixon@chq.org
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


Related Content