Workplace Giving

Joanne Felci 2

Hi there!


How are people currently entering workplace giving gifts?


I'm talking about United Way or if your company allows you to have money taken out of your paycheck to be sent to a designated charity, etc.


We currently put the hard credit gift on the company's record (i.e. who the check comes from like Microsoft for example) then soft credit any individual donors that the money is actually from


What are other people doing?

Ryan Hyde

For gifts originating from our own employees (automatic payroll deduction), accounting sends us a monthly report and we hard credit those gifts onto the record. Usually these are pledge installments, so they get applied to the appropriate pledge.


For UWay gifts, it gets more complicated. The short answer though is that we hard credit the gift to the UWay org that is cutting us the check. We have hundreds of people who allocate their gift to us, though, and going in and doing all of those soft credits is just not feasible. Instead, when our local United Way office sends us the annual report of everyone who gave, I match those people up with their constituent IDs, save UWay IDs to the constituent record as an attribute (if they are new UWay donors), and import the gifts directly onto the donor's record, using special fund and gift type codes that mark these gifts as not actual cash but as intent to give. These types of gifts are not included in year-end tax letters since not all of that money is going to be realized. 


So each person has the total the "pledged" to us hard credited on their record (note: we do NOT record this as a pledge. There's nothing I hate more than a million open pledges), and after that, whatever lump sums get paid out to us just go on the United Way record.

Joanne Felci 2

Ryan Hyde:

For gifts originating from our own employees (automatic payroll deduction), accounting sends us a monthly report and we hard credit those gifts onto the record. Usually these are pledge installments, so they get applied to the appropriate pledge.


For UWay gifts, it gets more complicated. The short answer though is that we hard credit the gift to the UWay org that is cutting us the check. We have hundreds of people who allocate their gift to us, though, and going in and doing all of those soft credits is just not feasible. Instead, when our local United Way office sends us the annual report of everyone who gave, I match those people up with their constituent IDs, save UWay IDs to the constituent record as an attribute (if they are new UWay donors), and import the gifts directly onto the donor's record, using special fund and gift type codes that mark these gifts as not actual cash but as intent to give. These types of gifts are not included in year-end tax letters since not all of that money is going to be realized. 


So each person has the total the "pledged" to us hard credited on their record (note: we do NOT record this as a pledge. There's nothing I hate more than a million open pledges), and after that, whatever lump sums get paid out to us just go on the United Way record.

Thanks Ryan!


Part of what I'm trying to solve is pulling lists for our annual report. We base our levels on either pledge or cash payments and we want to recognize the designated gift (if we have that information) without double counting the cash gift when the check finally comes in. I wanted to do a real pledge on donor record then paycash from the check from the org that is on the org record, but you cannot do a pay cash as a soft credit

Ryan Hyde

Well if you wanted to, you could put a pledge on the donor's record and pay it from the gift you're recording on the org's record. When you go to apply the gift to a pledge, there's a button in the lower right called "load pledges from" or something like that. 


The problem is that the United Way takes a cut from every gift, so you're never going to realize the pledge 100%. This is why I hate saving these things as pledges. Instead, I save them as gift type "other," and this is the only category of gift that receives this type. That way, any time anyone wants me to pull a list for any reason based on giving history, I just ask them if they want to consider intented UWay gifts as well. If they say no, I don't include gift type "other," and if they do, then I do include it. Easy peasy. Also, since these gifts are arriving on donor records via import, it's a pretty quick process.


Of course, in order to make that work, you need to start retaining UWay IDs on the constituent record so that you can use those to match up UWay donors with RE constituents. So the first year you decide to do this, it's going to take forever because you will have to look up each donor manually, but after that first year, things go much more quickly.

Christine Cooke 2

If these gifts are deductions out of someone's paycheck, they should be HC to the individual, it is their money, the company or org. is only a conduit to get the funds to you.  And that individual should be thanked for the contribution.