Tribute Gifts from Anonymous Donor

Joan Caviness

We received a gift in memory of a pet (we are a canine-health charity), but the donor wished to remain anonymous. The gift is marked as anonymous on the miscellaneous tab of the gift record. The tribute is entered as usual.


The letter created identified the donor, so we had to manually change it to anonymous. If I had not seen the "anonymous" tag, it would have gone out incorrectly.


Is there a better way to make sure anonymous donors truly remain anonymous, even in a tribute situation?


Thank you for sharing your ideas and practices!


Joan Caviness

AKC Canine Health Foundation

Dariel Dixon 2

You would have to create your letters to have a condition for if the gift is anonymous.  Depending on how complex your letter process is, it shouldn't be too bad.  If you have a simple mail merge, you can just create a condition based on if the gift is anonymous.


And actually, you can just add a condition in your letters to have this phrasing changed based on the "Gift is Anonymous" field if you're already using a conditional mail merge.  If you are familiar with conditional statements using Word mergefields, I think something along the lines of { IF { MERGEFIELD Gift_Anonymous } = TRUE should work.  You can probably get it working with a little bit of web searching on how to do it and some general trial and error.  Granted, don't forget you can't copy and paste when dealing with those mergefields.

Joan Caviness

Wow! Thank you. I didn't expect to get such a thorough answer so quickly. I appreciate your help; I'll give it a try.

Veronica Williams 2

Joan - My experience when a donor states he or she wants to be anonymous is not that they don't want you to acknowledge the gift with a thank you letter, but rather the donor does not want to be listed by name anywhere in any recognition lists, and doesn't want anyone else to know he/she made the gift. And in that case, using the Anonymous check box on the Miscellaneous tab works perfectly.  When you print reports from RE, in your User Settings, you have to tell it to print "Anonymous" in place of a donor's name.  That will use the Gift Misc tab box in Gift Reports.