Tribute versus Gift Attribute

Beth Jarrett · October 2016

We have an Annual Campaign to recognize graduating Seniors by putting their names on a plaque. We will receive gifts from many donors for many kids. So it is slightly different than a lot of people giving in honor of one person. I would like to use the Tribute Module for this, but can't figure out how to do this and end up with the reporting that I need at the end of the year to recognize both the donor on the individual listings and the honorees in the "In Honor of" section. Has anyone else done this? Previously, we used a Gift Attribute of "Senior Wall" and the child's name in the description field. But that leads to having a whole lot of names in that table the next year. Any suggestions?

Karen Stuhlfeier · October 2016

I would use the Tribute Module and assign the tribute to the individual's record. I would also put an attribute on the gift showing that it is part of this inititative. I would then be able to pull a list based on this information and the list would be in alphabetical order by the student's name. You also want the student's record to have the information that a gift was given in their honor.

Jen Claudy · October 2016

In your case, I would definitely use the Tribute Module. Instead of a Gift Attribute as Karen mentioned, I have a Gift Subtype of "Tribute Gift" so that I can have that column on the Gifts Tab and see those gifts at a glance. But either should work for your purposes.

However, I use a Gift Attribute for the actual tribute information, as we usually have 1 or maybe 2 gifts for each tribute and most of the time we have no prior connection to the tributee. The Gift Attribute, however, doesn't have a Table under the Description Field but is a Text Field. If there are more than one in memory or honor of the same person, I double-check that the text entered is identical when I pull the donor lists for the Annual Report. If the tributee is already a Constituent, then I enter a Relationship Link with Relationship/Reciprocal of "Tribute Gift".

Karen Stuhlfeier · October 2016

We set up a specific gift attribute with a table for naming opportunities for a campaign and it worked really well.

The nice thing about gift attributes is that you can make the description many different data types including text or a table that you can create specifically for that attribute.

We also used a text field one time for tributes for one individual where we wanted to be able to pull the specific messages out to put them on a list.

Beth Jarrett · October 2016

Jen Claudy:

In your case, I would definitely use the Tribute Module. Instead of a Gift Attribute as Karen mentioned, I have a Gift Subtype of "Tribute Gift" so that I can have that column on the Gifts Tab and see those gifts at a glance. But either should work for your purposes.

However, I use a Gift Attribute for the actual tribute information, as we usually have 1 or maybe 2 gifts for each tribute and most of the time we have no prior connection to the tributee. The Gift Attribute, however, doesn't have a Table under the Description Field but is a Text Field. If there are more than one in memory or honor of the same person, I double-check that the text entered is identical when I pull the donor lists for the Annual Report. If the tributee is already a Constituent, then I enter a Relationship Link with Relationship/Reciprocal of "Tribute Gift".

Thank you, Jen! These are good suggestions. I had not thought of using the Relationship link to track the tributes--will start doing that, too.

Beth

Beth Jarrett · October 2016

Karen Stuhlfeier:

I would use the Tribute Module and assign the tribute to the individual's record. I would also put an attribute on the gift showing that it is part of this inititative. I would then be able to pull a list based on this information and the list would be in alphabetical order by the student's name. You also want the student's record to have the information that a gift was given in their honor.

Thank you, Karen--your comments are very helpful! Having it generate the list is really the biggest part of what I am trying to achieve and I really don't want to get a report with the information split up. I will test this out on my sample database and see if I can get it set up properly.

Beth

Karen Stuhlfeier · October 2016

For my list of tribute gifts for our annual report I create a gift query that I then export to get my merge fields for a Word document. It works really well. Please let me know if you'd like more information about how I do that.

Beth Jarrett · October 2016

Yes, I would like to know how you do that. Previously I have exported to Excel, but I would like to know how to do this in Word as well.

Thank you!

Beth

Tribute versus Gift Attribute

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