Best Practice for tracking memorial / tribute gifts without RE:Tribute

Forrest Baker:
I am wondering if anyone has developed a good practice / procedure for tracking memorial gifts w/out using RE:Tribute. We don't currently have the funds to purchase this module, but we receive quite a few memorial/honor gifts throughout the year. We currently tag memorial gifts only in the Reference field of the Gift record. Do others use attributes? How do you keep track of acknowledgement that should be sent to family members of the deceased? Do you soft credit family members or, in the case of an Honor gift for a living individual, do you soft credit the honored person?

I used to work at an org with no Tribute module initially but did eventually get it.

No soft crediting. You need to be sure you understand how soft credits are used in your org and at nearly all orgs soft crediting would be completely incorrect for tribute situations (which is why the tribute module exists).

The only way we were able to do this was through gift attributes. You can create an attribute which pulls in a constituent record name to show who the person being tributed is. We then had several others to show the tribute type, notification address info, etc. You can't link the gift to the tribute person this way but you can easily query on that attribute to see who has made a tribute to X person. We used the attributes on the gift to design a letter to go to the acknowledgee.