Outputting the original donor when querying on soft credit gift records

Ken Willey

Hello!


I am aware that in RE, under the query options, beneath the "gift processing" tab, you can choose to credit the soft credits to "Donor," "Recipients," or "Both." I also know that if "donor" is chosen, the output will only show the original donors. If "recipients," then only the people who got the soft credits. Then, of course, "both" means that both are included, generating multiple rows for the same gift.


That feature works well and everything, but is there a way, after choosing "recipients," to output the name of the original donor in each output line? For instance, we would like to send letters for donor advised gifts that say, "Thank you (the soft-credit recipient) for giving to us through such and such an organization (the true donor)."


Thanks!

Joanne Felci 2

I recommend attaching your query to a constituent export.


In the output include Name and the gift, include soft credit name as part of the gift - if there are many soft credits on a gift have the number be more than 1 to capture them all in the export


This will give you the hard credit (name) and the soft credit name(s)


You can also include address or whatever else you would want/need in the export


Good luck!

Joanne

Ken Willey

Hello! Thanks for the response! I've thought about doing that, too, but because we're sending mail to the SC recipients, we also need the option to include their address. It doesn't seem that there's a soft credit field for that, but perhaps I'm wrong? Do you know a way of retrieving it in that case?


I think if that doesn't work, I may be forced to generate two different CSV files and merge them into one table via the SC constituent ID.

Dariel Dixon 2

Are you using export for this? I'm fairly certain that these fields exist. Using query is not the most ideal way to export this data.


I send out this data for our DAF donors through mail. We have configured the address fields so that the address and addressee information is coming through correctly. Also, we have our DAF organizations classified as DO NOT MAIL/No Valid Address, and our acknowledgement letter merge is set to exclude those, so only the soft credit donor letter is created.

Joanne Felci 2

Ken Willey‍ - you are correct address information for the soft credit donor is not available in the export. I think your best bet is to do two separate exports - one for soft credits so you can include the donor address, contact, info you need and one for the hard credit donor (if indeed you are sending them something as well).

Ken Willey

Thanks for your response, Dariel! I think one problem is that we do actually email both parties: the organization and the soft credit recipient. The organization letter needs to acknowledge the name of the soft credit recipient (that's easy, because there are "soft credit" fields that can be chosen as output values). On the other hand, for the letter that goes to the donor, we need to acknowledge the company name. However, that's not something I've figured out how to do. Ideally, each gift would just have one row that has all the information: Org name and address, SC recipient name and address, and then the gift information. Ultimately, we need to send mail to both parties and mention the name of each party to the other party. And RE just doesn't seem to have a straightforward solution for that.

Ken Willey

Thanks, Joanne! I suspected that that's what I need to do. It will probably look like an Excel "VLOOKUP" table join using the SC constituent ID.