Recording "Group Fundraising" gifts from a community foundation

Alicia Van Straten

I have read through many posts about soft credits and hard credits as it relates to DAF.  We are currently revisiting our procedure as we used to hard credit the organization (in this case our local community Foundation) and soft credit the donor.  So for recognition purposes, say a donor wall, both entities would get recognized for the same gift.  While I know many would not recommend this, this community Foundation also gives many large grants to non-profits, us being one of them, and so we not only have to make sure the DAF donor is stewarded/recognized, but also the Foundation, which is why we have done it this way.


Recently, this community Foundation held a 24 "crow funding" sort of event.  They selected 40 non profits in our community (competitive application process), to be the recipients.  Each non profit had it's own web page, and the public, during these 24 hours would select their non profit and make a donation.  Then our local NFL team Foundation did a percentage match to all of the non profits based on amount raised and number of donors.  


We have a list of all donors with their information (address, email, phone, gift amount).  I am pushing to hard enter the gift on the donor's record and not soft credit the Community Foundation as all the gifts were done online through a website they managed/set up.  However, some of our donors were donors that have DAF funds established there and did give offline but through this "campaign.  My boss thinks we should also soft credit the Foundation so that they also get recognized and not "tick them off".  Ok, fine but I can't see any IRS reason as to why to soft credit them?  Or any IRS reason to hard credit the Foundation, and soft credit the donor?  Many of these gifts are under $100 as they only allowed credit card gifts.


Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.  What would you do?


Alicia