Best practice for deceased constituents with spouses

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Lizzy MacRae
Lizzy MacRae ✭
Ancient Membership First Reply
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
We're wondering how other non-profits handle deceased constituents with spouses, do you create a new constituent for the remaining spouse or switch the remaining spouse to primary? If you create a new constituent do you worry about soft crediting past gifts?
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  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen ✭✭✭✭✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Lizzy MacRae:
    We're wondering how other non-profits handle deceased constituents with spouses, do you create a new constituent for the remaining spouse or switch the remaining spouse to primary? If you create a new constituent do you worry about soft crediting past gifts?

     We mark deceased record as deceased.  We do not switch records as this would result in incorrect data for attributes, education, employment etc.  We do have business rule that gives option to soft-credit surviving spouse for all spouse gifts in the past.  This has worked fine for us.

    (We also uncheck the Spouse check box so that addressee/saluations auto change to just surviving spouse's name.)

  • Christine Cooke 2
    Christine Cooke 2 ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Lizzy MacRae:
    We're wondering how other non-profits handle deceased constituents with spouses, do you create a new constituent for the remaining spouse or switch the remaining spouse to primary? If you create a new constituent do you worry about soft crediting past gifts?

    Mark the constituent Deceased. Create a new constituent for the living spouse.  Soft Credit the living spouse with deceased spouse gifts using the SC tool in the drop down.

    I personally do not unclick the Spouse box because we will list the deceased spouse along with the living one in the annual report within that first year.  it's easy enough to have a query to go back and change that later.  That would depend on the volume of deceased you have to deal with every year I would suppose.

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