Someone has died, and the obituary ends with a line you have read a hundred times without ever stopping on it: in lieu of flowers, donations may be made to…
If you are the one reading it, you want to know whether you are still allowed to send flowers anyway, how much to give, and whether the family will ever know it was you.
If you are the one writing it, you have a deadline in the morning and no idea what name belongs after the word to.
Underneath, those are the same question, and it has a short answer: the family would rather have a donation than a bouquet, and they are asking you to give to a cause instead of sending an arrangement. “In lieu of flowers” is a short phrase, it is permanent once it is printed, and it decides where a great deal of money goes. Families write it in a hurry, during the worst week of their lives, and then it sits in the newspaper directing gifts for years.
Here is what the phrase means, how to word it so it says what your family actually wants, and what happens to the money after somebody writes the check.
What “in lieu of flowers” actually means
Lieu is an old French word for place, and it survives in English almost nowhere else. The in lieu of flowers meaning is simply this: in place of flowers. The family is asking that you give to a cause instead of sending an arrangement to the funeral home.
That is the whole of it. It is a request, not a rule, and no one is checking.
Families ask for three reasons, usually more than one at a time.
- The flowers do not last. A funeral can fill a room with arrangements that are gone by the following weekend.
- The money can do something. The same amount, pooled from forty people, pays for something still there in a year.
- The person cared about something specific. A school, a church, a hospice, a cause they gave to quietly for thirty years. The obituary is the last chance to say so out loud.
None of that means flowers are wrong. Nothing about a funeral is compulsory. The Federal Trade Commission’s Funeral Rule exists precisely so families can “buy only the funeral arrangements you want”, and the same spirit extends to the people attending. A bouquet is a kindness, not an obligation, and so is a donation.
In lieu of flowers wording: lines a family can copy
This is the part people get stuck on, and the reason the in lieu of flowers wording matters is that the sentence is an instruction. Once it is printed, it is where the money goes. Vague wording produces vague results: gifts scattered across three organizations with similar names, or checks that arrive somewhere nobody intended.
Three rules cover almost every case.
Name the organization exactly as it is registered. Not “the cancer people” and not an abbreviation. If two organizations in the state have similar names, one of them will receive your family’s money by accident.
Say where to send it. A mailing address in the obituary saves forty phone calls to a funeral director who does not have the answer either.
Check the organization before you print. The IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search lets you confirm in about thirty seconds. You can “check an organization’s eligibility to receive tax-deductible charitable contributions” before the name goes in the paper.
Wording when you want the money to go to one organization
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that memorial contributions be made to [Organization’s full legal name], [mailing address].
In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made in [Name]’s memory to [Organization’s full legal name].
The family requests that, in lieu of flowers, gifts be directed to [Organization’s full legal name], which [Name] supported for many years.
Wording when you want the money to go to a specific fund
This is the version most families do not know is available, and it is the one that keeps the money together instead of letting it disappear into a general account.
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the [Name] Memorial Fund, c/o Miami County Community Foundation, 702 Baptiste Dr, Paola, KS 66071. Please make checks payable to the Miami County Community Foundation and write the fund name in the memo line.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the [Name] Scholarship Fund at the Miami County Community Foundation.
Note the check instruction, because it is the single most common error in this whole subject. Checks are made payable to the Foundation, with the fund name in the memo line — never payable to the fund itself, which a bank cannot deposit.
Wording when you are not ready to name anything yet
Sometimes the obituary deadline arrives before the family has agreed on anything. That is normal, and there is wording for it.
In lieu of flowers, the family will announce a memorial fund in [Name]’s honor at a later date.
In lieu of flowers, the family suggests a donation to the charity of your choice in [Name]’s memory.
The second line is honest, and it is also the weakest option you have, because it scatters the gifts. If you have any sense of what the person cared about, say it, even loosely, as “a cause supporting music education”, and the giving holds together.
What to do when an obituary says in lieu of flowers
Say you are on the other side of it: the obituary is in front of you, the line says in lieu of flowers, and you want to do the right thing.
Follow the request. If the family asked for donations, send a donation. The one common exception is a single arrangement for the service itself, and if you are close enough to the family to wonder about that, you are close enough to ask them.
Give what feels proportionate, privately. There is no established amount and nobody is keeping a list. A reasonable private benchmark is what you would have spent on an arrangement.
If that is more than you can do this month, a smaller gift is not an insult. It is the number of givers that tends to matter to a family, not the size of any one check.
Say who you are, or the family may never know. This catches people out. Many organizations will not think to tell the family who gave unless somebody asks them to.
Write the person’s name in the memo line, tell the organization the gift is in their memory, and, separately, send the family a card. The card is what the family reads; the donation is what the cause receives. They are two different acts of kindness and neither substitutes for the other.
Do not feel rushed. A memorial gift arriving three months later is welcome, and often more so. The first two weeks are the ones a family cannot take anything in.
Where “in lieu of flowers” money should actually go
Every in lieu of flowers line names a destination, and the destination decides everything that follows. Families generally have three choices: a national charity, where the money is absorbed into a very large budget and an acknowledgment letter closes the story; a local nonprofit, where it stays in the county and the family can usually see what it did; or a fund in the person’s name, the option most families do not realize they can have.
What a named memorial fund actually is
A community foundation holds charitable funds on behalf of the people who set them up. The Miami County Community Foundation is a 501(c)(3) established in 2007 and based in Paola, Kansas, and many of the funds it holds began exactly this way — after someone died and the people who loved them wanted the money to stay together.
One of them shows the pattern plainly. The Shifting Gears fund carries the full name In Memory of Regan Johnson. The same instinct works outside a community foundation. When Bill McNatt — a long-time member of the Louisburg United Methodist Church, instrumental in its youth group, who gave countless hours to mentoring young people — died in May 2025, he left his legacy to the church to support youth in the community, and the church established a scholarship in his memory.
Neither is an abstraction. Both are what an in lieu of flowers line looks like ten years later.
What it takes to set one up
- $10,000 establishes an endowed fund. The balance stays permanently invested and cannot fall below what was put in. As the Foundation’s executive director puts it: “you cannot fall below that amount.”
- $1,000 establishes an expendable fund, which can be spent all the way down. When it is spent, the fund closes.
- Seven to ten business days to set up.
That last number is the one to act on early. An obituary goes to print in a day or two; a fund takes a week and a half. If a named fund is something your family is considering, call the Foundation at (913) 404-7287 before the obituary is filed, so the wording and the timing line up rather than working against each other.
Once a fund exists, there are two ways to give to it: the Donate Now button on the Foundation’s site, which opens a drop-down of available funds and takes a card or PayPal, or a check payable to the Miami County Community Foundation with the fund name in the memo line, mailed to 702 Baptiste Dr, Paola, KS 66071.
If you want the fuller version of what goes wrong with memorial gifts — and the five mistakes families make most often — that is covered in what people get wrong about memorial donations.
Is a donation in lieu of flowers tax-deductible?
Usually, yes, with two conditions that catch people out.
It has to go to a qualified organization. The IRS is explicit: you may deduct charitable contributions “of money or property made to qualified organizations if you itemize your deductions.”
A gift handed straight to the family, however kind and however needed, is not a charitable contribution in the eyes of the IRS. It is a gift to a person.
And you have to be able to prove it. IRS Publication 1771 sets the rule plainly: a donor cannot claim a deduction for any monetary contribution “unless the donor maintains a record of the contribution or a timely written communication from the charitable organization.”
At $250 and above, a bank record is not enough. You need a contemporaneous written acknowledgment from the charity itself.
In practice, that means: keep the canceled check or the card receipt, and keep the letter the organization sends you.
Gifts to the Miami County Community Foundation qualify. The IRS classifies it as a publicly supported charity under section 170(b)(1)(A)(vi), a 50% limit organization for deduction purposes, and its filings are public on ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.
None of this is tax advice, and a memorial gift is a poor reason to make a tax decision. But if you are giving anyway, there is no reason to lose the deduction to a missing receipt.
FAQ: in lieu of flowers
Can I still send flowers if the obituary says in lieu of flowers?
You can, and no one will be angry. But the family asked for something specific during a week when they had very little control over anything, so the kinder reading is to honor it. If you want something physical at the service, one arrangement plus a donation covers both.
How much should I give in lieu of flowers?
There is no established figure and no expectation. Many people give roughly what they would have spent on an arrangement. Give what is comfortable. Families remember the number of people who gave far longer than they remember any single amount.
What does “in lieu of flowers, memorials are preferred” mean?
The same thing, in older phrasing. “Memorials” here means memorial donations, not headstones or plaques. If the line does not say where to send them, the funeral home handling the service will usually know.
Will the family know I donated?
Only if you make sure of it. Put the person’s name in the memo line, tell the organization the gift is made in their memory, and ask that the family be notified. Then send the family a card yourself, which is the part they will actually read.
Can we set up a memorial fund after the obituary has already run?
Yes. An obituary line is not a deadline for the family, only for the wording. Gifts can be gathered afterward and a fund opened once the family has decided what they want it to do, which is often the better order.
If the gift is to celebrate someone living, see what an honorarium is.
Conclusion
The in lieu of flowers line is four words of instruction written at the worst possible moment, and it outlives everything else in the obituary. Name the organization exactly. Say where to send the money. Say what the person cared about, even roughly, so the gifts hold together instead of scattering.
And if what your family actually wants is for the money to still be doing something in ten years — a scholarship at the high school, a fund that pays for the thing they cared about — that is a decision to make in the first week, not the first year.
The Foundation’s ways to give page sets out every route, from a single memorial gift to a permanent fund in someone’s name. Or call (913) 404-7287 and talk it through with someone before the obituary goes to print.
