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When a donor makes a tribute gift (in honor of or in memory of someone), WeGive can send a notification email to the honoree letting them know a gift was made in their name. If those notification emails aren’t going out, here’s how to diagnose and fix the issue.

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Step 1: Check if your Tribute Made trigger message is Live

Tribute notification emails for one-time gifts, pledge installments, and donor-portal tribute additions only send when you have a Tribute Made triggered message set up and its status is Live. This is the most common reason tribute notifications aren’t sending — the trigger was never created or is still in Draft status. To check:
  1. From the Dashboard, go to Triggers.
  2. Find the Tribute Made trigger.
  3. Look at the messages attached to it:
    • No messages exist? Create one — see step 2 below.
    • A message exists but shows Draft? Open it and change its status to Live.
    • A message is Live? Move on to the filter checks in step 3.

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Step 2: Set up the Tribute Made trigger message

If no Tribute Made message exists yet:
  1. Go to Triggers and click into Tribute Made.
  2. Click Create Message.
  3. Choose Email as the delivery method.
  4. Select your verified send-from email address.
  5. Write the subject line and message body. Use personalization variables (such as the donor’s name, gift amount, and tribute name) to make the notification feel personal.
  6. Set the status to Live.
  7. Save the message.
Once live, any new tribute gift with a tribute email address will automatically trigger a notification to the honoree.

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Step 3: Check your trigger and audience filters

If the message is Live but still not sending, the trigger or audience filters may be too narrow. Open the message and review:
  • Trigger conditions — these control which tribute events qualify. If any condition doesn’t match your actual tribute gifts, the message won’t fire.
  • Audience conditions — checked separately from trigger conditions. Both have to pass for the message to send.
If you have more than one message on the Tribute Made trigger, only one message fires per event based on its position in the hierarchy order. A message higher in the order that matches first will prevent messages lower in the order from sending. See Why Your Triggered Message Isn’t Sending for the full troubleshooting checklist.

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Step 4: Send notifications for past tribute gifts

Once your Tribute Made message is Live, it only fires for new gifts going forward. For tribute donations that already happened before the trigger was enabled, you can use the Retrigger feature to send those missed notifications:
  1. Go to Triggers → Trigger History.
  2. Filter by the Tribute Made event to see only tribute-related entries.
  3. Select the entries for past tribute payments that should have sent a notification.
  4. Click the Retrigger bulk action.
Retriggering creates a fresh copy of each selected event and processes it through the now-live trigger message, sending the notification email to the honoree. The retriggered send uses the current data on the transaction, so if a tribute email address was corrected after the original gift, the notification goes to the updated address. You can also retrigger a single event from the Trigger History section on an individual supporter’s record or transaction detail page.

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A note on recurring donations with tribute details

Recurring donation plan installments that include tribute information send their honoree notification through a separate, automatic system that does not depend on your Tribute Made trigger message configuration. If a recurring tribute notification is missing, the issue is not related to the trigger setup described above — contact the WeGive support team for help with that specific case.

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Quick checklist

  1. Does a Tribute Made triggered message exist for your account?
  2. Is its status set to Live (not Draft)?
  3. Is a verified send-from email address selected?
  4. Are the trigger and audience filters matching your actual tribute gifts?
  5. For past gifts: have you used Retrigger on the missed Trigger History entries?
Need help? Reach out to the WeGive support team and we’ll walk through it with you.
Last modified on October 22, 2026