Copy and imagery

The usual fundraising register — the emotive build, the escalating language, the urgent close — is designed to make a stranger care. Here nobody is a stranger, and that register reads as somebody selling their grief back to them.

Plain and specific

Say who they were, what the fund does, and what the auction is for. That is the whole page.

Specificity is what makes it feel like them: what they taught, the team they coached, the thing they were known for at work, the joke everybody has told at the funeral. Generic tribute language could be about anybody, and the audience notices.

Use the family's words

Where the family or a close friend can write two or three sentences about the person, use them exactly rather than editing them into charity prose. Their phrasing is better than anything a committee will produce, and it is theirs.

Where they cannot write anything — which is common and entirely reasonable — keep it factual and short. A name, what they did, what the fund supports. That is enough.

Photographs

• The family chooses which photograph, always, and may take time to
• A photograph they like is better than a photograph that is technically better
• Do not use the funeral photograph or anything from the last illness unless they chose it
• Do not use a news image, particularly where a death was reported
• One photograph is usually enough; a gallery can feel like a display
• Ask before using any image of children in the family

Where a family cannot choose, or would rather not, the campaign works without a photograph. A name and a plain description carries it.

What not to write

• Cause of death, unless the family specifically wants it named — some very much do, particularly where the fund supports research or prevention
• Circumstances, especially where a death was sudden, violent or is under investigation
• Medical detail, which belongs to them
• Anything about how the family is coping
• Language that makes the person a lesson — "so that no other family has to" is powerful, and only the family gets to decide whether to use it
• Urgency devices — countdowns, "only hours left", pressure framing. Wrong instrument entirely

Where a death was reported publicly, the family may still not want the details repeated by their own fund. Public knowledge is not consent.

Ask what they do not want said

One direct question at the start saves a great deal: is there anything you would rather we did not mention, show or be asked about?

Families almost always have an answer, and almost nobody asks. It also gives whoever is running the fund something to say when a well-meaning contributor wants to add a detail.

Item descriptions are about the items

The page header carries the reason. Individual listings do not each need to restate it, and a catalogue where every lot repeats the loss is harder for the family to look at than a plain one.

Show them before it goes live

The whole page, in final form, to whoever the family designated — and give them time to sit with it and permission to change anything without explaining why.

It will be there for years. Ten minutes of review beats a correction later, and the act of asking is itself the thing that makes this feel like it was done with them rather than around them.

General information, not legal or tax advice. Whether contributions are deductible depends entirely on which entity receives them, and setting a memorial fund up correctly at the start is much easier than fixing it later — this is worth one conversation with an adviser or a community foundation.