In Honor/In Memory Notifications

Rebecca Hamilton

Hi all! I'm in a new role and am VERY much a beginner with RE NXT. Currently, when honor/memory gifts are made, we run the Honor/Memorial Contributors List report (monthly) and send it to the acknowledgee to let them know that a gift has been made in honor or in memory of them/their loved one. But this seems to me that it's an internal report, not an appropriate way to notify someone that a gift has been made. What is everyone doing to acknowledge IHO/IMO gifts? Thanks!

Crystal Bruce

@Rebecca Hamilton discussion moved to Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT discussion forums. Thanks!

JoAnn Strommen

@Rebecca Hamilton Welcome to the BB Community Forums.

I also use this report for most of my correspondence with families re memorial gifts. I will write a personal email or letter to go with it. Have had a couple of instances where I ran data thru Export to create a spreadsheet for them when list was extremely long.

While the report is pretty basic, I just make it more personal with my email/letter. It gives them what they need: names and addresses.

Christine Robertson

@Rebecca Hamilton Glad to have you in the community! I think that this report is one of the easiest ways to provide the honoree/family know who to thank for making a tribute gift. I've usually done what @JoAnn Strommen mentioned as far as sending it with something else that is more personalized.

Rachel Cavalier

@Rebecca Hamilton

Another team in my department deal with In Memory gifts, but I'm part of the team that deals with In Celebration gifts and for these we update our celebrants once a week (while we are receiving donations in their honour) with a list of the names of those who have given as well as passing along any happy birthday messages or other greetings. We put the names as they should appear on the list in the reference field and the messages in an attribute, and since every celebration has it's own package - we can just pull out the list of names and spot any new messages pretty easily.

We put everything on a special “festive” letterhead or use a similarly branded email template to go with it.

Our Giving in Memory team have a similar sort of thing going on with specific branding for their letterhead paper and email template but, of course, with a different tone. They tend to do one off emails or letters as we receive donations as typically we might only get one or two donations in memory (or on anniversaries) of someone, whereas for our In Celebration program we can get many more in a short time period.