Next of Kin Acknowledgement letters

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Can you share who in your organization is responsible for producing Next of Kin Acknowledgement Letters? How large is your Org? Do you have a dedicated team for memorial giving?

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  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
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    Q 1. I am as dba.

    Q 2. Alumni and Advancement office staff of 17.

    Q 3. No memorial giving team.
  • The data entry staff (for now) run tribute/memorial acknowledgements (there are 3 of us across 4 locations). We have a total of 9 staff members (which includes part-time/volunteers). We do not have a memorial giving team; we consider memorials to be a normal every-day gift entry process.

  • Dariel Dixon 2
    Dariel Dixon 2 Community All-Star
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    I don't know if that responsibility resides in your organization. Regarding memorial gifts, it can be difficult to track down the appropriate people who should receive the acknowledgement letters. However, I believe it should be incumbent on the donor to state who the gift acknowledgement should go to, or which family representative it should be.

    Working for a healthcare organization, we get plenty of memorial gifts. Trying to find an address to send family letters to can be troublesome. I don't think that many organizations have the ability to have a person dedicated to just this as we are all working with limited resources. Unless your number of memorial gifts could support having such a person, I don't think you'll see many organizations having someone who only works on memorial gifts.

    My organization is quite small, with a team of less than 10 for our entire operation. I think this is not too big of a project that it needs someone dedicated to it, just someone willing to pick up the phone and make a call or two.

  • The stewardship person would be responsible for this but we have very few memorial gifts relatively.

    Our team is comprised of eight people who are not development officers.

    There is not a team for memorial gifts.

  • The gift entry person is responsible, and yes, the donor should indicate what family member receives a memorial notification. We get a number of these in the form of Mass intentions, but we consider them part of regular gift work.

  • Rachel Cavalier
    Rachel Cavalier Community All-Star
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    For in memory donations, we have a fundraiser in our legacy team who deals with those kinds of gifts. Our Fundraising dept is about 18 people I think.

    It's not really a dedicated team as much as that one person who manages the Giving in Memory programme.

  • Our organization is comprised of just under 250 employees over multiple locations, but I work with a Development team of about a dozen (including a few other analysts) on donor stewardship and donation entry and acknowledgments. I am mainly responsible for our Tribute program and producing the resulting Next of Kin Acknowledgements. It is usually up to the donor to provide the contact info for these letters to be sent, but I will enter the family details if none is provided and I can clearly connect a relative, or can route a notice in care of a funeral home.

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