Network For Good/Crowdrise

Margaret Whitaker

We have started to receive checks from a Crowdrise Site (Network For Good).  What's best practice for recording the donations? 

do you record the hard credit to the individual or to Crowdrise/NetworkFG or have the individuals already received a tax receipt from NFG?  



Do you treat the applied fees  in the same manner as credit card company fees?  I guess I need information on how to treat this from start to finish, thanks!!

Jen Claudy

See this thread: https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/147/20354?post_id=66238#p66238  (if that doesn't work, Search for "Network for Good Contributions").



I think there is a vital piece of info that could be causing some confusion.  Before getting Online Express (BB product, integrated with RE), we used NfG as our online donation platform.  So we would record gifts under the donor's record.  I believe NfG now (or maybe always has?) operates ALSO as a crowdfunding platform.  That we have not experienced...yet.

Rebecca Mandell

Hi Margaret,



For all third party donation platforms that we get donations through (employee payroll deductions, crowdfunding platforms, etc.) we hard credit the platform (N4G) and soft credit the donor. The donor does get a receipt from the platform, but we do send a thank you note.  



We ran into additional challenges when these 3rd party platforms subtract their processing fee from the donation amounts paid to us, rather than charging us for the processing fee separately. When that happens, we see the original amount of each gift in the payments/reports from the platform, but we receive a check/EFT for the net amount. (If we did pay the fee separately, we would use the system above, logging the full donation amount as revenue and our finance dept would track the fee as an expense). In this case the donor gives one amount, say $100, and we get paid a diferent amount ($100-processing fee). We want to credit the donor for the full amount they gave, but only count towards our revenue actual dollars received from the platform. Since RE won't let you assign a soft credit for an amount greater than the hard credit, the system above doesn't work.



One option is to flip flop the hard credit (use this for the donor) and soft credit (use this for the platform), but my organization didn't want to do this because it would be an exception to our overall policies around how we use the hard/soft credit, which we also use for DAFs, family foundations, and other funds that don't come directly from the donor.



The other option, suggested by RE support staff, is to track these gifts using the stock/property gift type, which allows for you to log a price when donated (donation amount), and a price when sold (actual revenue), or, alternatively, use the price when sold for the donation amount and track the processing fee as a brokerage fee. We don't currently handle stock/property gifts so this works for us. If we do start accepting these types of gifts, we could set up gift subtypes to distinguish between actualy stock/property gifts and cash gifts that come through a third party platform. 



Ups and downs to both options. I'd be interested in hearing what other ways are out there as well...

Lindy Kingins

Network for Good (NfG) is a website where users can donate to charities and search for volunteer opportunities.The website charges donors a 3-5% administrative fee for donations. Network for Good provides an automated tax receipt, but encourages organizations to acknowledge donor contributions.



In the case of organizations like Network for Good, where the tax receipt has already been issued to the donor, we have chosen to view this as a gift from the organization and therefore H/C Network for Good and S/C the donor, but only for the net amount that was received on the check. We send the donor an annual thank you letter for being a donor, but no tax receipt.



This is just another one of those data entry issues that is subjective and will be handled differently by different organizations -  as long as each organization makes a policy to handle these gifts all the same way so that you don't end up with a mess on your hands.

Margaret Whitaker

Thank you all for your wonderful insight.  Can't do the stock coding option as we handle quite a few of those fairly regularly.  I think that I will have to go the route of the HC for NFG and SC for the donor and place the net amount in the SC Receipt amt/no field.