Tribute Donations are gifts made in honor or memory of another person. Honorees have their own records in Neon CRM, which are tracked separately from your regular constituent database and can be accessed from your Tributes List. Honorees do NOT have their own individual accounts. Acknowledgees - the person to be notified about gifts for a particular tribute - do have Neon accounts since you may want to send them a system generated thank you email or thank you letter.
Accepting Tribute Donations from Constituents
To collect Tribute donations online, add the Tribute Name and Tribute Type fields to one or more donation forms.
If you would like a representative of the tributee to receive a notification of gifts for this tributee, add Acknowledgee Name and Acknowledgee contact information fields to the form as well.
Tribute and Acknowledgee fields are available to add to legacy Individual and Company Standard Donation Forms, as well as on Donation Forms created using the Forms Builder.
To add the form fields on legacy donation forms, navigate to the Settings cog Global Settings Forms & Web Pages Standard Forms Configure Fields & Sections. The full guide to customizing your standard forms is found here.
To add the form fields on a donation form created in the Form Builder, drag the Tribute and Acknowledgement field from the Form Editor to the body of the form:
Click into the Tribute & Acknowledgment panel to open the panel and configure how you would like the information to be collected, including any Acknowledgee contact information.
Please note: To add Acknowledgee Information form fields to the donation form, click anywhere inside the Tribute & Acknowledgment tile, scroll down to the bottom of the tile to the Acknowledgee Information section (as seen in the first image below) and select the right arrow in the section. After you select this section, all available acknowledgee form fields are revealed (as seen in the second image below). Select the green plus (+) icon next to the fields you wish to include on the donation form to collect applicable acknowledgee information.
Once you've added the Tribute fields to a donation form, you will need to start monitoring tribute donations so that you can reconcile those that are submitted via your online donation forms. More details on the reconciliation process are outlined below.
Adding Tribute Donations as a System User
To enter a new Tribute donation, begin to enter a new donation. On the Donation: Create page, start typing a name into the Tribute Name field to choose the tributee for this donation.
This will start a search for existing tribute records If the record was previously created as someone who has had donations made to honor them, select their name from the list, otherwise, select Add New to create a new record.
Acknowledgee is the person who should receive notification that a tribute donation was made.
Typically for Honor donations, this will be the person who received a donation in their Honor. Because honorees are not tracked as accounts in Neon CRM, you would need to create an account for them to receive an acknowledgement.
For Memory donations, this is typically a friend or family member of the deceased who should receive notification about this donation.
To select an Acknowledgee, start typing their name into the Acknowledgee field. This will bring up an account search dropdown that will search all Neon CRM accounts.
If you find a match, select it from the list to link acknowledgment of this donation to that account. If no match is found, select New Acknowledgee.
Selecting New Acknowledgee will bring up a window to create a new Individual account for your acknowledgee. Enter the relevant contact information - email, mailing address, or both.
Now that both the Tribute Name and the Acknowledgee fields are complete, select Continue to complete adding the donation.
On the Donation Summary page, information will be displayed about both the honoree and the acknowledgee in the Acknowledgee Information section. If you entered contact information for the acknowledgee, you will choose the desired option for sending an acknowledgement - either through email, letter, or both.
Reconciliation
When a Tribute Donation is made through your online donation forms or entered into Neon via the Import Manager, Neon CRM does not automatically connect the gift to the honoree. You must manually reconcile these gifts using the Donations to Reconcile feature.
To do so, add the Tribute & Matching Donations to Reconcile widget to a dashboard.
Clicking View All at the bottom of the widget will take you to the Donations to Reconcile page, which lists any Tribute or Match Pledge donations that have come in via your front-end forms and need to be reconciled. To reconcile a Tribute donation, click Reconcile under the Action column.
This will take you to the Donation: Edit page. The right panel will display information entered online by the donor about the honoree and Acknowledgee. To copy this data, select the Reconcile buttons next to the Acknowledgee or Honor/Memory name as needed.
Selecting these buttons will populate the Acknowledgee and Tribute Name fields with the names entered by the donor. They may or may not match existing records in your database. If any potential matches are found, a drop down list of suggestions will appear:
If a match is found, click on the row to select the record. If the Honor/Memory Name does NOT match an existing Tribute record and/or the Acknowledgee does not already have a NeonCRM account, then you will be prompted to create a new Tribute record and/or a new account for the Acknowledgee.
Once you've reconciled the donation, you will notice that the donation record is now linked to the Acknowledgee's NeonCRM account and/or the Tribute record.
Acknowledgee Notifications
A System Email and a System Letter are available to notify an acknowledgee of a tribute gift. They can be accessed by navigating to Settings cog Global Settings System Emails or System Letters.
You can also specify whether Neon CRM should default to sending a System Email, System Letter, both, or neither when a System User reconciles a tribute. Adjust this by navigating to Settings cog Global Settings System Email & Letter Defaults.
At the conclusion of manually entering a tribute donation, a Tribute Acknowledgement email and/or letter will be offered.
For constituent-entered tributes, you have these options during reconciliation.
Viewing and Reporting on Tributes
Your Tributes List can be accessed by navigating to Fundraising Tributes.
From here, you can view and edit existing tributees and add new ones. The Type column tells you if the tribute is designated as Honor or Memory, meaning that all donations to this tribute name will be in Honor or in Memory of that person. You can also see the total donation amount made in tribute to each individual as well as the number of donations.
You can search for tributees by name or filter the list by the record's Create time, by Type, by State, or by Status.
Click on the name of a tributee to view and/or edit their record.
From the Tribute detail page, you can click the name of the donor or acknowledgee to navigate to their account page. If you click anywhere else on the donation line, you will be taken to that donation's detail page.
To un-link an Honoree and/or Acknowledgee from a donation, edit the donation record and simply delete the honoree and acknowledgee names from their respective fields.
Click on New Tribute Record to add a person to your list of Honorees.
Enter the First Name, Last Name, and specify the Type (Honor or Memory).
Donations with Tribute and Acknowledgee information can also be viewed by running the Tribute Donations Report. Navigate to Reports New Report Fundraising Tribute Donations.
When selecting Search Criteria, you can choose to search by Acknowledgee Name, Tribute Name, Tribute ID, and Tribute Type.
Click on the Edit Columns button to add Tribute and Acknowledgee Output Columns to be displayed in the report results.
Certain Tribute and Acknowledgee information can also be searched and viewed in the Donation Detail Report.