Gift Entry Policy : hard credit to HOH

Pam Gealy

We converted to RE last November and the smoke is finally clearing.  I'm very new to the world of fundraising, so hard credits, soft credits, etc. are all new to me.  I've had very, very little training on RE.  All that I know is pretty much self taught.  I've created some query/exports for household giving and tried to match that to our revenue numbers.  I've found that if I export based on HOH and the gifts were not hard-credited to the HOH then those gifts don't show up on my query/export results.  (I know that there are flags for soft-credit processing on exports, but I'm trying to simplify this as much as possible)

I would like to institute a policy that our hard credit gifts always go against the HOH.  It seems as if our conversion process always marked the male as HOH.  However, if the female spouse is the alum, then we give her the hard-credit.  In my (naiive...newbie) mind, she should be the HOH, since she is getting the hard-credit.


Am I way off base on this?  I think that the HOH functionality is great for mailings.  Maybe that's all that we should be using it for.  I don't want to 'fix data' if it's not necessary, but it seems like the hard-credit should always go against the HOH and then we would always be sure of our query/export results.

Gina Gerhard

I think the approach would be to really understand how to best pull hard credit gifts -- and not start to blend this issue with head of household.  

• A hard credit vs. soft credit gift should be straightforward, but there's a bit to learn about how to accurately pull gifts based on this distinction.  Hard crediting also relates to producing acknowledgements for tax purposes, so you don't want to base the decision of where the hard credit goes on any other criteria.
• Head of household is primarily a way to not produce duplicate mailings for households.  

JoAnn Strommen

The issues of HC/SC/HOH can be confusing - especially at first.  As Gina said HC/SC is separate thing based on donor and your organization's procedures. In following the posts you will find that there are orgs that only HC the HOH and there are others that HC the signatory on the check regardless of their HOH status.


You can run queries/exports to include SC amounts.  We, as a rule, SC the spouse for gifts made by the other spouse.  So, when querying/exporting all the gifts can be included.


And yes, in many cases HOH may be the wife.  For you, when it's an alumni, for us when it's a board member, volunteer, Y member, etc.  (And there are organizations, who only do one record per household per their procedures.  Not what we've chosen to do.)


Welcome to RE and the forums.  You'll find lots of answers in past forums and when you don't find what you're looking for, ask.

Gina Gerhard

I'll just add that HOH is a potentially changing condition -- if the spouses divorce, decease, etc  

So you would not want to tie pulling gift data to whoever is the current HOH -- that might not be the same as when the gift was made.


 

Jessica Smith 4

I too am new to RE and still learning and re-learning stuff. Lot of self teaching and combing the forums going on here.

With the EOY tax credit processes we were confronted with the HC vs SC and who gets credit situation and it has now wormed it's way through everything we do it seems. I have more questions everyday and different reports need different settings for SC depending on the information we need. That may be a post of my own at a later date. 

We just changed our settings to a spouse gets SC when a donation is made, no matter who is the HOH. We are now backtracking and manually updating the spouse to be SC-ed for past gifts (can't find a global change to do it). The reason for that is we are a school and when both parents are constituents, we want to know if either spouse gave a gift for recognition in giving clubs, tax purposes and outreach to parent non-givers. Conversely we know it may skew some of our data if both parents aren't constituents. Again, may show up as my own post later. 

I have not seen where HOH matters in much except exports having to do with mailings. Informational exports I keep both constituents in so I can review whatever data on each person I am prowling for. 

Whatever you decide to do, have it written as a procedure policy so everyone knows this is how you are going to do it and don't deviate under penalty of flogging. We do not have a P&P manual yet and I want one so bad. I have a notebook of questions and suggestions and one day hopefully soon will put something together.

Good luck to you! 

Jen Claudy

Jessica - There is no Global Change, however, you can probably (with some testing, and a good, clean backup of your db before you do it "for real") do this via Import.  You would need to use Import to Export the Gift data (ID and Import ID) and Constituent data (ID and Import ID), then use another program (Excel or Access, probably) to add a SC column with the SC ConstID.  Then Import the data back.


I've never done this, and don't have time to test right now, but would be happy to help you test and run it (assuming it works) if you want.

Jessica Smith 4

Hi Jennifer,

I am hoping we got most of them. I ran a query on constituents with a spouse who has a constituent code and scrolled through those (love that feature on Const query!) and changed them with the Soft Credit for Spouses gift command, also a very handy tool. Kind of the long way around the track but it seems to have gotten most of them. I have run into a few stragglers but for the most part everyone is looking ok. That may change though as we go so I may take you up on it later!

Christine Cooke 2

I have worked in several schools.  And yes you are not crazy.  There needs to be a policy in place, and reasoning behind each part of it.  You should choose a main policy for who is marked HoH and then the exceptions, i.e., female Alumnae, widows of Alums, the Board Member or other key person is the female, and in a same sex marriage/partnership how to determine the HoH.


If you do this, then the HC and SC will become easier to work with, but it is the bane of everyone's existance.  Since you are new to RE I would suggest Bill Connors book "Fundraising with the Raiser's Edge".  it will give the viewpoint you need to make the right decisions for your org moving forward.

Jennifer Broadwell

I have been on RE for a few months now after being on a different software platform for 5 years.  One thing I don't think RE does well (or at all actually) is household reporting.  Like everyone else said, the HOH really only comes in handy with mailings (and in some cases reports, but it can be a pain to make sure you're pulling the data correctly).  We don't have a policies and procedures manual *yet, but what I have started doing is entering the gift on whichever spouse signed/sent the check.  I have told our CEO that there is no household cumulative total I can give her, so I just select the "both" option when exporting the gifts.  That way, each spouse has only their legal credit gifts.  So in theory, you could add up the report and not have any duplicate giving.  But, you can't see how much the COUPLE gave unless you manually tweak the report.


For cases of donor advised funds, right now I am only entering one spouse (usually the husband) for the soft credit on that gift.  Otherwise, each spouse gets the same amount of credit for that gift, and it skews the totals in my reports.


One thing that's important to consider about reporting is the philosophical viewpoint on recognition/soft credit.  At my former org, because recognition reports were used to make sure the right donors were recognized, it was ok if there was double counting. But, as i'm sure you know, you can't use those same reports to report true financial figures.  Just my 2 cents!

Madeleine Holdsworth

I don't think it's just a RE business rule/policy question, it's also a fundraising question.  The donor is the person who wrote the check, provided the credit card number, etc.  HOH status is not the determinant, at least not in our organization.  For example, if we have a married couple with two individual records, the gift is entered based upon who made the gift (as defined above) and the other spouse is soft credited.  So with some couples, the HOH has the hard credit, but on other gifts, the non-HOH spouse has the hard credit and the HOH spouse gets the soft credit.  Reporting pain to say the list, but that is our policy.

Gracie Schild

We handle this rather differently.  Spouses/partners with separate records are the rare exception, not the rule.  We don't really do ANY soft credits, especially not for donor advised funds. Since our relationship is with the donor and not Schwab or Fidelity or whomever, we give the "donor" the gift credit (but no tax credit) and note which DAF company it came from.  Since Schwab, et. al., aren't really donating money, we call this a "pass-through" and have a separate master batch for them.  I know it isn't perfect, but it fits our system and money flow. Also, if we have a single record for spouses, the whole record gets the credit.  I'm not sure what the advantage is to having it very strictly assigned to the person who signs the check - 95% of the time it comes out of a joint account, so clearly it's a gift from the whole household, not Mr. OR Ms..


Of course it gets sticky when a couple split up, but we move forward and don't correct backwards.  We also have some special cases (being an art institute) where both spouses are artists and each donates their own art to the gala.  Clearly we need to acknowldge the artist's donation as separate from a cash gift from the household.  We don't want to constantlly be sending two letters to the same household, so we "fudge" the primary record to be for just the one person but with both partners on the addressee and salutation, and then the secondary record marked as Do Not Solict, No Valid Address, etc., to keep from duplicate mailing.  Thank goodness we're tiny!

Susan Leslie

We use a different approach, I guess.  We have a heirachy (Alumni, Parents, Board, Faculty, Individuals) that we go by to determine HOH and the HOH record receives all hard credits for gifts.  We do not go by who signs the check.  This allows most reports to work smoothly for us, especially when we calculate lifetime giving.  Almost all of our correspondence goes to the couple as well so HOH works great us.