In Memory Of…The Heart and Science of Tribute Gifts

While planned gifts are part of any typical development plan, tribute and memorial gifts tend to fall by the wayside. It’s a missed opportunity to provide a unique service while inviting donors to support your cause. 

A few simple steps can make it easy for your donors and friends to make tribute and memorial gifts that can have a big impact on your mission. A section of your giving website - a way to make a gift - can include these ideas:

• Make a tribute gift in honor of someone
• Make a gift in memory of someone
• Establish a fund in honor or memory of someone

Provide donors clear instructions on how to enter the tribute or memorial information on a gift, and offer to notify the named honoree of the gift. For example, a husband may wish to invite friends to make gifts in honor of his wife’s upcoming milestone birthday. Setting up a simple system to track and manage those gifts  can not only build your donor database, it provides a high-touch service to those donors and the families of those being honored or remembered.

The passing of those who support your cause is another time families may be seeking ways to honor loved ones. For those wishing to name the nonprofit a beneficiary of gifts in an obituary  in lieu of flowers, provide suggested language:

Many families include suggested memorial contributions in lieu of or in addition to flowers. Suggested obituary notice language is as follows: In lieu of flowers, gifts in Alison’s memory may be made to ABC Nonprofit, 1234 Address, City, State, ZIP.  We will receive, track, acknowledge and report on any such gifts to the family so they may thank donors as well.

Donors committed to an organization’s mission sometimes consider establishing a permanent fund in a loved one’s honor or memory as well - an endowment that can carry his or her name and support a program in perpetuity. While this is most often a personal conversation that occurs in the meetings with family, there is nothing wrong with including this in a list of ways to honor or memorialize someone in your philanthropic materials. 

Other examples of tribute and memorials are physical. Some organizations offer a memorial garden with personalized bricks or a memory wall where families can choose to purchase a brick or plaque on the property. All of these ideas can be customized to what fits best for your nonprofit, your property and your mission.

Tribute and memorial gifts can honor loved ones by funding the missions and causes they championed. As development professionals, we simply need to create clear pathways for donors to consider our organizations as a place to remember and celebrate  loved ones.

• Timothy L. Smith