Lessons learned from a tribute donor cultivation pilot

Someone donates in memory of a loved one. It’s one of the most personal gifts your organization will ever receive.

Most email programs segment post-gift experiences by pipeline status: current, monthly, lapsed, nondonor. 

The post-gift window is where programs lose new donors, and a tribute donor who just lost someone getting the same stewardship track as a recent website donor might land flat.

Mind, the UK’s largest mental health charity, was in the same position. 

Tribute donors received one annual impact mailing and generic appeals, and most gave once and disappeared. So they tried something different.

Six emails, three to four weeks apart
On the Fundraising Everywhere podcast, Mind’s in-memory fundraising team shared the results of a six-email stewardship journey they launched in March 2025. 

The pacing was deliberate and sensitive: 3-4 weeks between sends rather than the one-month sprint of their standard donor journey before dumping them into the main file’s sequence.

The thank-you email hit 86% opens and 8% clicks. Then email 2, a supporter’s story about bereavement by suicide, lost them — opens dropped by half and unsubscribes spiked to 2.5%.

The middle emails recovered. A soft ask around planting a virtual tree in a loved one’s memory brought clicks back to 4%, and a story about Mind’s crisis support line hit 64% opens, the strongest since the first send. 

The final cash ask, framed as honoring the person who died, dropped to 46% opens, with unsubscribes climbing again.

From near-zero to a working system
The team is the first to say the sample is small and the data is very early, but the baseline they were measuring against was near-zero.

6 months in, 7 came back for a second gift, and two have converted to monthly recurring donors. 

And I do think there’s a lot to learn from trying a different, sensitive approach to stewardship of a donor who gives for what is often a deeply personal reason.

What to take from this
Look at whether your tribute donors have any dedicated post-gift email experience. If they’re getting the same emails as everyone else, you’re treating the most personal gift in your file like a routine transaction.

Make sure you have a system in place to tag and segment this type of donor.

Consider the pacing of an tribute donor journey. Mind’s standard journey compresses six emails into one month, but for grieving donors, they stretched it to six months because the emotional context demanded a different pace.

This is a long window, so forgive me if I’m sounding like a broken record: test it first.

Build with the flexibility to pivot. Email 2 lost people, and Mind is already considering moving that story later or testing a different one. 

That’s the kind of honest iteration that turns a first attempt into a real program that evolves over time.

The bottom line
Mind built something most programs don’t attempt: a stewardship journey for a donor segment many of us treat like any other. 

Now I’m already dreaming of ways to test this novel approach.

If you have tribute donors sitting in your general file right now with no plan behind them, that’s another potential gap to close before year-end.

Check our events list for more or reply to this email to submit one for consideration.

‘Til next time!
Sara