Memorial and honor gifts arrive at odd hours. Someone reads an obituary at 11 p.m., sees “in lieu of flowers, please give to the zoo,” and goes straight to your website. Whatever your online donation page asks them at that point decides whether your development team gets a clean tribute record the next morning or a vague note that says “for Grandpa.”
Getting tribute gifts into Altru from the web takes three things: a place on the form for the donor to say who the gift honors, a reliable way for that information to reach the gift in Altru, and a process for notifying the family. Each one needs a decision before you change anything.
Know what a complete tribute gift looks like in Altru
Before touching the form, agree internally on what “done” means. In Altru, tribute information generally lives in two places: a tribute (the person being honored or remembered, often with their own constituent record) and the revenue record that gets linked to that tribute. If the family should be told about the gift, you also need an acknowledgee, the person who receives the notification.
So a finished online tribute gift usually needs:
- Tribute type: in honor of, or in memory of
- The honoree’s name, matched to an existing tribute where one already exists
- Whether the family should be notified, and if so, the recipient’s name and mailing or email address
- Whether the donor’s name and gift amount may be shared with that recipient
- Any short message the donor wants passed along
Write this list down. It becomes both your form spec and the checklist staff use when processing.
Check what your current Altru donation form can capture
This is the part to verify rather than assume. Depending on your Altru setup, your donation web form may or may not offer dedicated tribute fields, and even where a form can collect extra information, it may land somewhere staff have to read and re-key rather than creating a linked tribute automatically.
The fastest way to find out is to test it. Make a small gift on your live or test form as “in memory of” a fictional person, then look at what shows up in Altru: Is the gift linked to a tribute? Is there an acknowledgee? Or is the honoree name sitting in a comment or note? If you can’t tell what is supported, Blackbaud support can confirm what the web forms in your version handle.
Three practical setups
1. One donation form with tribute questions
If your form can ask additional questions, add an optional “Make this gift in honor or memory of someone” section. If the form supports showing questions conditionally, keep the section hidden until the donor opts in so regular donors aren’t slowed down; if it doesn’t, keep the questions few and clearly optional. Staff then attach the tribute and acknowledgee in Altru during gift processing. This is the most common approach, and it works as long as someone owns the daily review.
2. A separate tribute giving page
Some organizations build a dedicated “Give in memory or honor” page and link to it from obituary language, the giving section of the website, and memorial funds. Every gift from that form is a tribute gift by definition, which makes the daily query trivial and keeps the main donation form short.
3. A named memorial fund page
When a family directs many gifts to one person, set up a page or designation specific to that tribute. Gifts arrive already tied to the right honoree, and you can report totals to the family without hunting through comments.
Build the processing routine
Online tribute gifts fall apart in the hand-off, not on the form. A few habits keep them clean:
- Daily query. Build a revenue query for recent online gifts that still need tribute work. How you filter depends on where the form stores the honoree details (a dedicated field, an attribute, or a note), so test the query against your sample gift. That list is the to-do queue.
- Search before creating. Honorees often already exist from earlier gifts. Search constituents and existing tributes before adding a new one, or you will split a family’s memorial giving across duplicates.
- Clean the acknowledgee address. Donors frequently know the family’s town but not the street address. Decide whether staff look it up, contact the donor, or send the notification through a funeral home.
- Respect the privacy choice. If the donor asked that the amount not be shared, make sure your notification letter template leaves it out.
- Send the notification promptly. Families notice. A week is a reasonable target for most teams.
Keep the form itself short and kind
A tribute donor is often grieving or in a hurry. Use plain labels (“In memory of,” “Who should we notify?”), make the notification section optional, and don’t ask for information you won’t use. Test the form on a phone, since many memorial gifts start from a link shared in a text or on social media.
Where Social Good fits
Everything above can be done with Altru and a clear staff routine. If your bigger issue is that the donation page itself is hard to use on mobile, Social Good Checkouts replaces Altru webforms with a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for donations, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, and writes the gift back to Altru.
Quick answers
Should the honoree get a constituent record?
Often, yes, especially for memorial gifts that may repeat. Check how your Altru setup handles tributes and follow your own data standards. It keeps tribute giving together and makes reporting to the family much easier.
What if the donor leaves the notification address blank?
Record the gift and tribute anyway, then follow your written rule: look it up, ask the donor, or skip the notification. Don’t hold the gift waiting for an address.
