Create a Tribute
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Create a gift tribute.
- Describe how to use soft credit data to improve fundraising.
Create a Gift Tribute on a Gift Transaction Record
Your donor, Candace, has a hard credit in the form of a gift transaction. The board member who influenced her gets a gift soft credit record to document her involvement.
What about the honoree for the gift?
Candace’s husband, Calvin Wong, loves HNMI. His birthday is next Tuesday. What does Candace give to the person who has everything? A donation to their favorite nonprofit. Soledad’s fundraising request comes at exactly the right time for Candace to support her favorite organization and get Calvin the perfect gift.
To track Candace’s wishes and Calvin’s relationship to the gift, you need a gift tribute record. And with the gift transaction record in place, you’re ready to create the tribute record. The Gift Tribute related list on the gift transaction is often the best place to start.
Use your Developer Edition org to create the gift tribute now.
- From the App Launcher (
), find and select Gift Transactions.
- Find and select the gift transaction you created in the last unit, starting with Candace Evans - 1000.00.
- On the gift transaction, click the Related tab.
- In the Gift Tributes related list, click New.
- Specify these details:
- Type: Honor
- Honoree Contact: Calvin Wong
- Honoree Information:
Birthday gift - Notification Date: Next Tuesday
- Notification Status: To Be Sent
- Notification Contact: Calvin Wong
- Notification Channel: Email
- Notification Message:
Your wife, Candace, wanted us to let you know she donated in your honor to HNMI. Thank you for your continued support and happy birthday!
- Type: Honor
- Save your work.
You’re taken to your new gift tribute record.
Explore a Gift Tribute
The gift tribute has fields for related gift transactions and gift commitments, plus details about the honoree and how you notify them that they were honored with a gift.
Information about the honoree and notification contacts can be stored in accounts or manually entered in the fields on the gift transaction record. In this case, you selected a person account as the honoree and notification contact.
How you notify a gift tribute recipient is up to your organization, but you can use the fields on this page as a starting point. For example, a Salesforce admin at HNMI already created a flow to email the notification recipient with the notification message on the notification date. HNMI’s admin already did the same for memorial gifts, but uses a different email template to inform an honoree’s family member or other notification contact.
Talk with your Salesforce admin or implementation partner about how you want to notify recipients.
Use Soft Credits and Tributes to Raise Money
Can you spend soft credits and tributes? Well, not directly, but they’re an important part of your fundraising data and strategy.
Finding and recognizing your most influential supporters with soft credits can lead to more and bigger gifts. For example, HNMI’s mission motivates Soledad—and so does the recognition she gets from being a responsible board member and all-star volunteer fundraiser who receives many soft credits.
Properly monitoring and recognizing tribute recipients gives you more satisfied donors who feel respected and understood. Candace is happy with how you treated her tribute gift, and her husband Calvin is overjoyed that she gave a donation in his honor. Maybe, if you’re lucky, he’ll give Candace the same gift for her birthday.
In this module, you learned about gift soft credits and gift tributes in Fundraising. You now have the basic skills to achieve your fundraising goals with these two important objects.
Now, test your skills again by completing the hands-on challenge at the end of this unit. After you finish, talk with your team about using gift soft credits and gift tributes to follow your donors’ relationships and build even stronger connections with your supporters.