Tributes as new Constituents...adding deceased people and pets to database

Amber Mullins
Amber Mullins
Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant First Anniversary
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

Hello! My organization has recently switched back to RE after using another database for a year. I have previous experience with RE but we did not use the Tributes module there. How can I keep RE from making NEW constituent records for tributes? We are an animal center and receive many donations in memory of people's pets. In the past week we've had several donations made in memory of pets and those pets are getting constituent records. Obviously we do not want go clog our database with a bunch of deceased pets (and humans for that matter). We cannot be the only org with this issue. So how are you handling it? What is the best practice for fixing these? I don't want to just delete the record as I want to keep information as it does relate to a donor. Any advice or tips/tricks is appreciated! (Also wouldn't it make more sense for RE to make the constituent record the acknowledgee vs the tribute?)

Comments

  • Austen Brown
    Austen Brown Community All-Star
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    @Amber Mullins - Are you using Online Express or NXT for donation forms?

  • Amber Mullins
    Amber Mullins
    Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant First Anniversary

    @Austen Brown We are using NXT for donation forms currently. They were using Online Express in the past though if that makes a difference.

  • Dariel Dixon
    Dariel Dixon Community All-Star
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management

    @Amber Mullins This is a tough one, because the tribute module is acting as expected. It wants to attribute a tribute to a constituent, whether deceased or not. I've seen several workarounds for this, but the one I'm most familiar with is using a dummy account like Anonymous and creating the tributes to that record. That way, all of the tributes are on that record.

    However, I think it might be better in this case to create the tribute on the record of the pet owner, if known. That would give you better gift tracking for you. You can use the Anonymous record for pets with unknown owners.

  • Amber Mullins
    Amber Mullins
    Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant First Anniversary

    @Dariel Dixon Thank you! That is what I have been doing for the tributes I enter. I have set up a Animal Tribute Record constituent and for the deceased people with no family to send a card to we send the cards to the funeral home to pass along to the family so I have been putting those under the funeral home just so I have a record that a card was sent.

    I'm mostly concerned about the ones that come in on our online forms since those are automated it is work on the backend going back and undoing it, if that makes sense! Yesterday I pulled a query of the online donations that contained a tribute and had to check each one that came in in the last week and move the donations around. Just took up a chunk of time so hoping for a better system/solution!

  • Rachel Kauer
    Rachel Kauer Community All-Star
    Kudos 4 August 2025 Monthly Challenge Badge Name Dropper Participant

    @Amber Mullins

    Hi Amber,

    We recently converted all of our old memorial/honoree information to tributes using the module because that made sense for us. We built them off the surviving spouses' records. I see two options where I in your shoes:

    1. Tribute Module/Pet Owner Record: In your case it would make the best sense (as someone else had said) to create the tribute record on the owner if known. I don't know if you currently add pet owners to your database if they are not also donors. However, it might be beneficial to do so and store that information for future appeals, or touch points on a pet's anniversary of passing to acquire those folks as donors when an appropriate grieving period has passed.
    2. Special Gift Attribute: However, an option my predecessor had used was tracking memorial/honoree information not with the tributes module but through special gift attributes done at the time of gift entry. They would then use a regular thank you letter mail process and export that special gift attribute field so they could pull out memorial/honoree gifts. The downside is, that they would have to manually copy and paste the notification recipient information into those memorial/honoree gifts they pulled out before they could do a mail merge. This is more subject to human error and more time-consuming.

    As always with “best practices,” they are established by the majority of users, and depending on the industry you are in, what works for the majority may not work best for you. So while the best practice may be the tribute route, if you find that doesn't work best for you, I would consider a workaround. But only if it works better for your org than the majority best practice. And make sure once you decide it is documented as a protocol so all current and future users at your org conform to it to keep your data consistently organized.

    If you are wondering why our org switched from option 2 to option 1, it was because my predecessor had been here for 20 years and didn't know about the tribute option and it made 0 sense not to use tribute with a school where almost 98% of our tributes are to former students. Our staff signed on for NXT and got a lot of training, became aware of the tribute module and decided to make the switch.

    Best of luck!

  • Amber Mullins
    Amber Mullins
    Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant First Anniversary

    @Christine Robertson Oh that's a thought! Thank you for that tip!

  • Beth Gallagher
    Beth Gallagher Community All-Star
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 2 PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management Name Dropper

    @Christine Robertson hey there! Do you have any examples of a form link I can look at? Curious how to capture this information differently without a lot of clutter. Thanks!

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