Creating New Honor/Memorial

Bernard Nemis
Bernard Nemis
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

Hello, Everyone.

How would you decide between creating a new Honor/Memorial from…

1. An existing constituent under his Honor/Memorial Tab (ie. John Doe as retired President and there's a tribute in his name)

2. Creating a new constituent record for Honor/Memorial that is not directly connected to a donor/constituent record (donor John Adams donating $1M to create a tribute for Innovation). If the latter, would you choose an organization constituent or an individual constituent?

Thanks.

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Comments

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 January 2026 Monthly Challenge 2025 bbcon Attendee Badge
    If donor is creating a tribute to a business, I would not put it on the individual's personal honor/memorial. Unless the donor said it's in his honor. Sounds like gift is in honor of the company Innovation from what you described. Or did he just recently retire and designate 'retirement' gifts to your org? If so, you could make a case for linking gift to his record.


    Our process would not create a record for "Innovation" to use Honor/Memorial. We would just create a record for donor John Adams and note on gift that it is tribute to... This can be done in reference, gift attribute, or notes - depending on what you use theses fields for. IMO, Innovation is not your constituent, so no record. We would send them acknowledgement that gift received in tribute.


  • Karen Stuhlfeier
    Karen Stuhlfeier
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    I have a record specifically for tributes like this. I call the record: Tributes - In Honor Of - Not attributed to an individual. On it I can create as many new tributes as I need. If a tribute is just in notes, attributes or on the reference line I wouldn't be able to pull my tribute list as easily for the annual report - and I have a query I built for this purpose that works really well and much better than the canned tribute report.

  • Bernard Nemis
    Bernard Nemis
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    Thanks, JoAnn.

    If the Endowment is directly connected to the initiating donor, like “In Memory Of”, - the tribute is on behalf a deceased constituent, we normally create the Honor/Memorial in that constituent's record. But I am not too sure if that should also be the case for an Endowment not directly connected to the initiating donor, like “In Honor Of” - the tribute is created for a program not necessarily connected to the initiating donor.

    Just like you referred to your 1st paragraph, if the initiating donor is not really connected to the Endowment (just like John Adams), I am more inclined to create a constituent record for the Honor/Memorial. If that's the case, should I use an Individual constituent record, or an Organization record?

    The gift John Adams is donating is an Endowment. He wants to create an Endowment Fund that will be used in the development of our school's Innovation program (not directly connected to him). We use the Honor/Memorial feature of RE to send out updates/letters to Acknowledgees.

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 January 2026 Monthly Challenge 2025 bbcon Attendee Badge
    Maybe another user will share their thoughts.


    We have a significant # of endowment funds. Many in honor / tribute to a family member, professor, etc. We do not create a constituent to record the "tribute." For those who set up the endowment there is a fund relationship added to their record. Otherwise gifts are just recorded on donor's record to that fund.


    As creating this tribute record is not our process I don't know how to evaluate what the implications would be of individual vs. org record. My gut would be org as Innovation program is not an individual.
  • Dariel Dixon
    Dariel Dixon Community All-Star
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management

    I think @Karen Stuhlfeier & @JoAnn Strommen make good points and represent two different ways of looking at the question. What Karen is doing makes a lot of sense being that she reports on tributes differently than JoAnn. I think you need to determine how you'll have to report on them to decide the best route to go.

    Personally, I wouldn't create a tribute for “Innovation” (BTW, I'm not really sure what that is supposed to mean). Determining if there will be other gifts like it from other donors would help me make the determination if I would create a tribute record or just notate it in the reference. Actually, the more I think about this gift, it doesn't sound like a tribute gift at all, just a regular gift with a directed fund.

    In this case, I'm not sure what the difference between being connected to the endowment and establishing the endowment. I would think that if I created an endowment to support Project XYZ, I would be the person getting the endowment reports, not necessarily the administrator of Project XYZ.

    I think it might just be easier to just create the fund, and put these gifts to that endowment fund, and forget about any tribute at all.

  • Bernard Nemis
    Bernard Nemis
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    Thank you very much, everyone. I have gotten some good insights on this. I will reevaluate what our current process is and see how we can improve moving forward. ")

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