IRA Distributions

Kathy Baird

Do you credit the brokerage firm (Fidelity Brokerage Services) and soft credit the donor...or do you enter the gift directly into the donor's giving history?  The check was written by Fidelity.

JoAnn Strommen

For a distribution, we receipt/credit the donor.  It's basically like a bank issuing a check for a depositor. 



You can find more posts on this if you search fundsvcs.org.  Posts/Q&A from people quite knowledgeable/very experienced in fund development.  Many are RE users but not all.

Gracie Schild

Hi - we haven't had much in the way of IRA distributions (in fact, I don't think I've ever seen one!), but we do get the donor advised funds checks from Schwab, Fidelity, United Way, and so on.  We have stopped using soft credits for these gifts, and rarely use them at all now.  Our relationship is with the donor, not the organization that issued the check on their advice. 



We call it a "pass-through" and treat it like this:



1. We have a separate "master batch" (template) for pass-throughs that includes the field "Gift Code".  We weren't using it for anything else, so it now has table entries for the most common pass-through organizations, like Schwab Charitible Fund.  We also included the "Receipt" field and set it to a default of $0.00.  For gift entry, we place the gift on the record of the donor, we drop down the name of the check-writing entity (or use **EDIT** to remind us to enter a seldom seen one), do everything else as usual, and include the name of the acknowldgement letter we have written specifically for this situation.



2. When producing donor lists, the constituent who ordered the gift is now given credit for the full amount we received.  Before, we kept including Schwab Charitable Fund in donor lists, which is absurd.



3. When producing the acknowldgement letters, we have a statement saying (roughly): Thank you for designating a gift of $xxx to the XYZ Fund through Schwab Charitable Fund (or whatever is in the Gift Code field).  At the bottom of the letter in our "tax blurb", we indicate the "Gift Amount" and the Tax-deductible Portion - which is the $0 defaulted in the Receipt field. If the Gift Code field is **EDIT**, we manually go into the gift and add the name of the "one-off" organization to the Title line of the Notepad - that way it's easily seen if we want to know which agency or organization the donor used.  We discussed using the "Bank" field on the first tab of the gift, but thought that might get sticky further downthe line.



So that's how we get around the "soft credit" issue when it really isn't a soft credit.  We decided that we don't really have a relationship with Schwab, so there was no need to credit them with the gift.  They usually do NOT want a written acknowledgement, so the person to talk to is the constituent.  We use a similar letter for matching gifts - thank you for requesting a matching gift from [company x] ..it was received on [date].  The "double" reporting of soft gifts was wreaking havoc on our lists - so out goes you!



I'm happy to discuss this if you need more info.



Gracie Schild

Advancement Services Manager

Institute of American Indian Arts

gschild@iaia.edu