Donation Favor Advice

[Gwyn]

For those of you out there that donated money to charity in leiu of favors, how did you go about it? I heard some people gave out cookies that said you donated money, i heard others give cards. I am just wondering about the details. Do you tell them the exact amount of the donation per person or the sum amount, how does that work? Ans when you actually make the donation, do you do a separate one for each guest/couple?

Also, those of you who have been to an event where a donation was given instead of a favor, were you okay with that?


I mean personally, and I am probably bad at this to begin with, I barely notice things like favors and such. I think the last two weddings I went to I left mine at the table. I am active in a cat rescue group and i would love to donate money to them but I dont want my guest to feel slighted b/c they didnt get a CD or bride and groom coffee bags or whatever. I mean a favor is supposed to be a kind of thank you for coming type of thing so i would want it to be somethign they would like too...

 

[rainbowtrout]

So...my thing with it is that you don''t know that the charity you are giving money to in their name is something they support. Then you''ve put their name on something that they don''t want to be associated with, which is sticky business.

I think a nice thing to do might be to ask or find a way to register for donations to the cat rescue group, OR just don''t have favors at all (which is a fine thing to do) and donate the money in your name anyway!

 

[Gwyn]

I am not too afraid of them not believing in the charity. Though I see what you are saying. we are only having about 45 people at the wedding and i think the only people that dont own a cat is FH parents. lol Oh wait, my grandmothers just died =( but she will probably have a new one by then. I think they all would like the charity i chose, I just dont know if they would like that i decided to give their thank you gift away. The particular group that we have leads me to believe that that would not be too much of an issue. It is more of a question of, if we do decide to go this route, how we do it.

 

[rockzilla]

At a wedding I went to this year, the groom''s brother had recently died (very young, and after a long battle) of a specific disease.

On each table, they had stand up photo frames with two openings - one side was a photo of the groom with his brother, both in tuxes (I think it was from another wedding) and the other side said something like "In memory of ______, donations to the XYZ Disease Foundation have been made in lieu of favors."

I thought it was really sweet, and it was almost more the point to honor the memory of the brother (they were SO close, and he had lived with him/taken care of him up until the very end) than the actual donation to the charity.

 

[laine]

What Rockzilla describes sounds perfect. You don''t need to tell anyone an amount, either per person or total. If there isn''t a specific person to honor (like some who has passed away) then I would just put up a nicely framed sign that read "In lieu of favors, donations have been made to the XYZ cat rescue" maybe with a cat picture or you and hubby holding a cat at the rescue place or something. I''d probably put it on the guestbook table or somewhere like that, and if the rescue has some sort of bookmark or business card sized handout, you could leave a few on the table if people wanted to take one.

For the actual donation, I''d just do a single donation from the "friends and family of Gwyn and Hubby"

And as a guest, I would not feel slighted. I often feel bad when tossing favors and wish the couple hadn''t wasted their money.

ETA: My mom attended a wedding where they did a donation instead of favors, to the Lance Armstrong foundation (I think there was some personal tie), and they had a basket of the yellow bracelets with a sign near the door on the way out. Everyone seemed to think it was nice.