A memorial gift is the one donation you really can’t afford to leave unthanked. The donor gave because someone died, the family is waiting to hear who remembered their loved one, and a missing letter tends to come up later in an uncomfortable phone call. So when your acknowledgement run in Altru produces letters for general gifts and quietly skips the memorials, it’s worth tracking down why before the next run.
In our experience the cause is almost never one big bug. It’s usually one of a handful of small mismatches between how the memorial gift was entered and what your acknowledgement process is set up to look for. Here’s how to find which one you’re dealing with.
Two different letters, two different audiences
Start by being clear about which letter is missing, because a memorial gift usually needs two:
- The donor acknowledgement goes to the person who gave. It’s a normal thank-you and tax receipt that mentions the gift was made in memory of someone.
- The tribute notification goes to the family or another named contact, letting them know a gift was made. It should not include the amount unless your policy says otherwise.
In Altru, the tribute and the people who should be notified about it are attached to the gift separately from the donor. A process built for donor thank-yous won’t automatically produce letters for the family, and a process built around tributes won’t necessarily pick up the donor. If staff are saying “memorials aren’t being acknowledged,” find out which of the two they mean. Often it’s the family letter that never existed as a step at all.
The usual reasons memorial gifts drop out
The gift was never marked as needing a letter
Acknowledgement processes generally pull revenue that is flagged as not yet acknowledged and has a letter assigned to it. If memorial gifts come in through a different door than your regular donations, such as a separate batch, a back-office entry by the development director, or a gift that arrived in an envelope with a funeral card, the letter assignment or acknowledgement status may not have been set. The gift is in Altru, but from the process’s point of view nobody asked for a letter.
The tribute is in a note, not a tribute
Staff in a hurry sometimes type “In memory of Jane Smith” into a gift note or reference field instead of adding a proper tribute to the gift. Anything that relies on the tribute record, whether a tribute letter, a query filter, or a merge field in the letter, will then find nothing. Spot-check a few of the missing gifts and see where the memorial information actually lives.
The selection behind the process filters them out
Many organizations build their acknowledgement run on a query or selection limited to certain designations, revenue types, or date ranges. If memorial gifts post to a dedicated memorial fund or designation, they may simply sit outside the filter. The same goes for gifts that arrive as pledge payments or split across designations. Open the selection your process uses and compare its criteria to one of the skipped gifts, field by field.
The letter template has nowhere to put the tribute
Sometimes the gift does get acknowledged, but the letter reads like a generic thank-you with no mention of the person being remembered. That’s a template problem rather than a selection problem: the merge fields for tribute name and type need to be part of the letter or export, and the wording needs to handle gifts with and without a tribute. If you’re not sure which tribute fields your export can reach, test in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before rebuilding anything.
The family has no usable address
For tribute notifications, the person to notify is often entered as a name only, or as a new constituent with no address or email. The process may skip them or produce a letter you can’t send. Make collecting the family contact part of how memorial gifts are taken, at the desk, online, and over the phone.
A quick way to confirm which problem you have
- Pull a query of all gifts in the last few months that have a tribute attached.
- Add columns for acknowledgement status, assigned letter, designation, and revenue type.
- Run a second query for gifts whose notes mention “memory” or “memoriam” but have no tribute. Those are your miscoded gifts.
- Compare both lists to what your last acknowledgement run actually produced.
The pattern usually jumps out within a few minutes: they’re all in one designation, or all from one batch type, or all missing a letter assignment.
Fixing it so it stays fixed
Once you know the cause, fix the records you can find, send the overdue letters with a short personal note, and then close the gap at entry. A one-page memorial gift checklist for anyone who enters revenue (add the tribute properly, add the person to notify with contact information, confirm the letter assignment) does more than any process change. Then add a standing query of tribute gifts with no acknowledgement and review it before every run.
If your memorial thank-yous are sent by email, Email Designer can send automated, branded acknowledgements from an Altru query, so a well-built tribute query can drive the email directly without a manual export each week. It still depends on the gifts being coded correctly, so do the cleanup above first.
Quick answers
Should the family letter show the gift amount?
Most organizations leave it out. Decide on a policy and build the template to match.
Can one process handle both the donor and the family letter?
It depends on how your acknowledgements are configured. Plan on treating them as separate steps unless you’ve confirmed otherwise in a test run.
