Tributes/Acknowledgees in RE

Carrie Clark · February 2018

Hi BB Community - I'm hoping someone can help streamline a process for us.

Tributes are kind of a big deal in my organization. We get a lot of them. And they take quite a bit of time because of how manual they are.

Most of them have very sweet messages that we record in the reference field of the gift. The trouble comes when we try to send information back to the acknowledgee about a tribute given. There isn't a report that allows me to include the reference field, and if I try to do a mail merge, there doesn't seem to be a way that allows me to add more than 1 tribute per letter.

I really like the Honor/Memorial Contributors List (in Reports), but I can't add in peoples' personal comments.

Does anyone have a process documented that works well that they'd be willing to share?

Joanne Felci 2 · February 2018

Carrie,

We record the tribute information - including any gift message - as a gift note in the Miscellaneous tab

We send individual gift cards to the family/whomever the donor indicates, that includes the message and this is merged/printed outside of RE, so we do an export of the information and merge from a CSV file

but we are not doing the volume of tribute gifts that it sounds like you are doing

Joanne

Jill Freidmutter · February 2018

Hi Carrie,

We are a hospice and receive a lot of tribute gifts that are acknowledged to a family member or loved on. Our process is a combination of manual and merge. 1. Multiple donors to same tribute: Our acknowledgement letter has space for up to 6 donors -- two columns of three each. Any additional we manually add. The body of the letter is pasted below (without the column break). (I hope the formatting doesn't get messier once I post this.) 2. Special notes: We keep a binder with the donation media, and with every batch of acknowledgement letters, we go through the donation media to make sure we manually add any special notes the donor would like to pass along directly beneath their address.

I hope this helps!

We are grateful to have received gifts from the following donors «Tribute_type» «Description». Notes of thanks have already been sent recognizing the thoughtful donations.

«ddrssSlttn_1_Dnor_Additional_Addressee_1»
«Address_1_Donor_Address_Block»

«ddrssSlttn_2_Dnor_Additional_Addressee_1»
«Address_2_Donor_Address_Block»

«ddrssSlttn_3_Dnor_Additional_Addressee_1»
«Address_3_Donor_Address_Block»

«ddrssSlttn_4_Dnor_Additional_Addressee_1»
«Address_4_Donor_Address_Block»

«ddrssSlttn_5_Dnor_Additional_Addressee_1»
«Address_5_Donor_Address_Block»

«ddrssSlttn_6_Dnor_Additional_Addressee_1»
«Address_6_Donor_Address_Block»

Please know that these gifts will enable Hospicare to continue to provide high-quality care to the people we serve.

Carrie Clark · February 2018

Jill Freidmutter:

Hi Carrie,

We are a hospice and receive a lot of tribute gifts that are acknowledged to a family member or loved on. Our process is a combination of manual and merge. 1. Multiple donors to same tribute: Our acknowledgement letter has space for up to 6 donors -- two columns of three each. Any additional we manually add. The body of the letter is pasted below (without the column break). (I hope the formatting doesn't get messier once I post this.) 2. Special notes: We keep a binder with the donation media, and with every batch of acknowledgement letters, we go through the donation media to make sure we manually add any special notes the donor would like to pass along directly beneath their address.

I hope this helps!

We are grateful to have received gifts from the following donors «Tribute_type» «Description». Notes of thanks have already been sent recognizing the thoughtful donations.

«ddrssSlttn_1_Dnor_Additional_Addressee_1»
«Address_1_Donor_Address_Block»

«ddrssSlttn_2_Dnor_Additional_Addressee_1»
«Address_2_Donor_Address_Block»

«ddrssSlttn_3_Dnor_Additional_Addressee_1»
«Address_3_Donor_Address_Block»

«ddrssSlttn_4_Dnor_Additional_Addressee_1»
«Address_4_Donor_Address_Block»

«ddrssSlttn_5_Dnor_Additional_Addressee_1»
«Address_5_Donor_Address_Block»

«ddrssSlttn_6_Dnor_Additional_Addressee_1»
«Address_6_Donor_Address_Block»

Please know that these gifts will enable Hospicare to continue to provide high-quality care to the people we serve.

This seems like it would be up our alley. Is this letter merged out of RE? If so, what type of letter is it in the mail tab?

Carrie Clark · February 2018

Joanne Felci:

Carrie,

We record the tribute information - including any gift message - as a gift note in the Miscellaneous tab

We send individual gift cards to the family/whomever the donor indicates, that includes the message and this is merged/printed outside of RE, so we do an export of the information and merge from a CSV file

but we are not doing the volume of tribute gifts that it sounds like you are doing

Joanne

We've actually considered doing this as well - moving it from reference to a note, which is probably more merge friendly.

Cindy Avery · February 2018

We use this same setup but center the names and addresses rather than having them in columns. My template in RE Mail Merge also includes the Gift Notes Field so any message from the donor can be included. To facilitate this, use the Miscellaneous Tab on the Gift record. Use "Tribute Message" in the Type field, Date, and on the Notes field type the message provided by the donor. This eliminates having to manually enter the information into the merged letter (or FORGETTING to manually enter the information). Sometimes the family of the tributee wants another complete list of donors (maybe a son or daughter is handling this for an elderly parent or they are afraid a notification letter has been misplaced). Unless you have entered the tribute message somewhere on the record, you will have no way to recreate this information short of copying and pasting everything from previous letters.

Jill Freidmutter · February 2018

Hi Carrie, the letter is on the Honor/Memorial Scknowledgement Letters tab in Mail. best, Jill

Jill Freidmutter · February 2018

Hi Cindy, Excellent point! I just added gift notes to the batch template.

Jennifer Lange · February 2018

Carrie Dufault:

Hi BB Community - I'm hoping someone can help streamline a process for us.

Tributes are kind of a big deal in my organization. We get a lot of them. And they take quite a bit of time because of how manual they are.

Most of them have very sweet messages that we record in the reference field of the gift. The trouble comes when we try to send information back to the acknowledgee about a tribute given. There isn't a report that allows me to include the reference field, and if I try to do a mail merge, there doesn't seem to be a way that allows me to add more than 1 tribute per letter.

I really like the Honor/Memorial Contributors List (in Reports), but I can't add in peoples' personal comments.

Does anyone have a process documented that works well that they'd be willing to share?

We use the Trib Mod in RE. We put one sentance thoughts (almost always enough) in the DESCRIPTION field. So yes - that means a new Trib for each donor (if they are all writing thoughts) but it's worked out at our volume.

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Carrie Clark · February 2018

Thank you all!

Candy Reichert · February 2020

‍Jennifer Lange‍ We also have the Tribute Mod in RE. Would you be willing to share the formating for the Tribute information in your letter when inserting the Description field? For some reason I haven't been able to get this to work yet in my mail merge.

Thank you,!!

Jennifer Lange · February 2020

Hee hee! You give me too much credit - we mostly clean it up by hand. However: in plain old Word merge, there is an option to insert text before a merge field *if that field is not blank.* So, if there IS a message, then insert "The message with the gift read: ______________" I don't know if that works with the RE letter mergers or not. It's a native Word>Quick Parts>Field>Mail Merge function

Candy Reichert · February 2020

I'm thinking I'll start putting the information in a Gift Note for Memorials. I could use Description and Notes fields for the info I'm looking for.

We get quite a few memorials for Non-constituents. I don't want to keep adding constituents that really are just memorials. With the Tribute Mod in RE, when they add a tribute on their gift I am required to add it to a constituent but do not want to keep creating a record for just a memorial recognition.

Does anyone else have this problem?

Elizabeth Rich · February 2020

We have the tribute module, but it is not very helpful for our tributes. We use notes on gifts and create letters using the query/export. If you would like more information, I would gladly share our process.

Dariel Dixon 2 · February 2020

Candy Reichert‍ I don't see that as a problem at all. I guess it also depends on the volume. If your organization was listed as "in lieu of flowers", I think it's only prudent to create a record for tributes. Also, it helps out if you ever need to do any reporting on those tributes as well. Obviously, it all depends on how much information you have, and if you have an acknowledgee or NIK to notify for tributes.

Rachel Cavalier · February 2020

We do create a record for memorials for "new" constituents but our In Mem team are starting to cultivate these donors as the community we serve does mark these kinds of anniversaries - so tracking multiple gifts in memory of the same person does come in handy. We have always tried to capture the relationships between the donors, deceased and any acknowledgees, even before we moved to RE, as this was useful when writing to acknowledgees.

Tributes/Acknowledgees in RE

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