Multiple marriages & giving history

Kathryn Yarzebinski

When a widowed donor remarries, how does your organization manage her record? Do you create a new record for her with her new name and her new spouse? If so, or if not, what are your reasons?

JoAnn Strommen

Kathryn Yarzebinski:
When a widowed donor remarries, how does your organization manage her record? Do you create a new record for her with her new name and her new spouse? If so, or if not, what are your reasons?

We do not create a new record.  Spouse info would be updated. 

When a spouse of constituent dies we mark the spouse record as deceased and change relationship/reciprocal to 'Former Spouse'.   When constituent marries again record would be updated with any changes to info. 

Guess we don't have any reasons to create a new record.  Donor is the same person.  If we are ever looking at lifetime giving history we would want complete record easily accessible.  Would not be if on separate records.  To us, changing existing record just seems much smoother.

My 2 cents.... 

Helen Wieger

Kathryn Yarzebinski:
When a widowed donor remarries, how does your organization manage her record? Do you create a new record for her with her new name and her new spouse? If so, or if not, what are your reasons?

Kathryn, We do the same as Joann. We also soft credit spouses for giving. To deal with that, we leave all the soft credits on the former/deceased spouse's record, but do not soft credit them for any gifts given after the death/divorce. When a constituent remarries, we start soft crediting the new spouse for gifts given after the marriage. If gifts were given while the constituent was unmarried, neither the former nor the new spouse is soft credited for those. Since our relationship with the donor does not change with marriage, it is useful to keep the giving, event attendance, appeal, relationship, note, etc history that we have on the records.