Creating new constituent for tributes with partial info

Rakhee Morzariah:
With the holidays around the corner I know we will be receiving a lot of 'in honor of..' gifts. I am hesitant to create new constituents when we only receive partial address information for these tributes and it leads to a bloated number of constituents in our database who we can't necessarily reach out to in the future. How do other orgs deal with this? Any tips or ideas would be greatly appreciated...!

Rakhee,

I know this probably goes against what most orgs do but this is what our policy is.  Generally if the person receiving the tribute/memorial is not in RE, we do not add a record for them.  The donor yes, the IHO/IMO designee, no.  We do send them a letter acknowledging the gift received in their honor/memory but it's not merged via an RE record.

This would be especially true if we only had partial info.  What value is it?  If you have another tribute to person with same name most of the time you have no way of knowing if it's the same person even.

Our rational: 

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  bloated database - I'm a stickler for not adding useless records.
  
  
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  we're a community based org and while some would consider the IHO/IMO designee as a potential donor we don't unless their name comes to us by some other means.
  
  
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  we're a community based org and if IHO/IMO designee lives in another community with a Y - they are that Y's prospective donor/supporter.
  
  

Just thoughts from one org. [:)]

Melissa Farrell:

 Our organization received many tribute donations -- some from people/organization that are not in our data base, as well as for person named who are not in our data base. 

If the donor has provided at least an address, we set up a record for them, as the policy is that they could be future donors.  If we do not have an address, then we use a record named AR, and note the name of the donor in the Reference.  (The acknowledgment letters are done from copies of the donation.)

If the person named is not in our data base, we use a record named Deceased, with the name of the person and the donor in the Reference.  In seven years we have not had an IHO for someone who is not in the data base.  If that should happen, we will probably add a record named Tributes.

 

We create a constituent for every tribute (IHO or IMO) even if we have no other information.  I've been concerned about the 'bloating' to the database because of this. But I'm not sure what other option we have to accurately reflect these. We have a "tribute" constituent code that's used for these to differentiate that they are only in RE because they were a tribute.  The majority of our tribute gifts are memorial, so the new constituent is immediately marked as deceased.

We do a lot of reporting on who our tributes are both internally and publicly, so we need a way to maintain that information accurately.  If someone has other ideas on how to prevent these unnecessary constituents, PLEASE share!

I will say, as a health care organization, we can usually find at least a DOB and/or deceased date through patient information, assuming the tribute received care at some point in our clinic system.  Otherwise, google is a miracle worker with finding obits as needed.

One additional note: if the acknowledgee  for the memorial gift is not already a constituent (and we see no value in tracking them for later, which is usually the case), we do not give the acknowledgee a separate constituent - we typically only create them as a relationship on the tribute's constituency.