Tributes -- Best Practices for names

Question

We have the tribute module and use RE7/database view.  We are a senior living community and get lots of tributes, especially at year end.  I am looking for suggestions on the best way to handle the following scenarios.

* Gertrude gives a gift IHO her granddaughter, Hannah.  Her default add/sal is Mrs. Gertrude Jones, but for this gift, she wants to be recognized as Grandma Jones.
* Mary gives a gift IMO Aunt Sue.  Her default add/sal is Ms. Mary Mack, but for this gift, she wants it to be from Mary Mack, Bobby Becker and Lisa Lim.  (Last year's gift was from Mary Mack and Bob Becker)
* Bob gives a gift IMO Carrie and Curt, but last year's gift was IMO Curt and Carrie.  Jim gives a gift IMO Curtis and Carrie.

How do I configure things so the names come out right?  How much "poetic license" do you take when it comes to Jim/James, Name1/Name2 vs Name2/Name1, etc?  Right now, we use a separate spreadsheet but I'm thinking there has to be a way to do it in RE…???

Aldera Chisholm · Answer

Like Joe, I don't want to change/add addressee and salutations for donors for single gifts. But I also don't want external spreadsheets - too much to manage! Dropping the info into the reference line of the gift often will give you what you need. If you have a lot of them, you could create a gift note type for Hon/Mem gifts. That way, when you query on your Hon/Mem gifts, you can easily output that specific type of gift note, which will have the info you need.

Rachel Cavalier · Answer

We record how the donor's name should appear on the correspondence with the celebrant in the reference field on the gift - this is particularly handy when a celebrant received a lot of donations in their honour for their celebration and then we can just export a list of the gifts out with the amounts and the names as they should appear so we can copy and paste that list in their email/letter.

We also publish a list of celebrants in our magazine - for that we've decided on the format names should be in and then since we create a package for every celebration, the name as it should appear on the page is an attribute on that package.

This is only for living honourees - another team deals with the in memory program and I don't know how they keep track.

Joe Moretti · Answer

Curious what others would say,  but this is one of those cases where you can have a zillion different ways to address someone and you certainly do not want to have a zillion additional addressee/salutations to have the various recognition. Our person who handless this just copies the message and inputs into the letter. I don't think there is a "simple" way to handle this in RE.