[Melody Penner]

Our Development staff plans to steward the relatives of some of our major donors that are elderly. The stewardship would involve invitations to events related to the donation or the faculty that it supports, mailings from the faculty/department.
How to handle this in RE?
My director thinks that adding a proposal that reflects these indivduals in stewardship as well as soft crediting the gifts to each of these relatives would be the answer to ensure they were included in all of the mailings. I am fine with the proposal but I have a concern with soft crediting the gifts. These relatives should not be recognized in any way for these gifts and when generating lists for recognition how do we differentiate between stewarded relatives and those others (spouses, owners of companies) that should be recognized?
I was thinking that we should use a constituent attribute where we could flag these indiviudals as having an "Interest" in a specific faculty/department and use that to ensure they are selected for a mailing relavant to a specific faculty/department.
What do you think, do you have any other suggestions?

(BTW, I looked at perhaps using fund relationships for this purpose but there is no way to query on the fund category of the fund which is what we use to indicate what faculty/department the fund is associated with)

thanks so much, I look forward to your thoughts.
Melody

[Melissa Siobhan]

I agree that soft crediting is not best because if you effectively solicit them then their giving will eventually be mixed in with that of their parents.

We use a constituent attribute called Send Event Invitations for everyone who might not normally qualify in the query criteria for events.

Also, If you have proposals you have the Prospect tab. On the prospect tab (general) there is an area for philanthropic interests. In addition to the general Animals, Environment, etc. we also have codes for areas of our agency (Village - Adoption, Village - Family Services, etc.) That may be a place to store which department or school they are interested in.

[Melody Penner]

Thank you Melissa for your thoughts on this. I appreciate back up on the soft credit question. I will look at your suggestions and see what works for us.
thanks again.
Melody