Soft Credits

Meg Nygren

How do you handle soft credits? Do you soft credit a spouse with each gift made? Does this do anything to your reporting (show the gift as double the amount)? I am new to RE and am curious how other organizations handle soft credits.

Jodi Hofer

@Meg Nygren Yes, we soft credit a spouse with each gift made unless the donor specifies they don't want the spouse to get credit. It doesn't show double.

Karen Stuhlfeier

@Meg Nygren Soft credits do not double the amount on reports. You do need to know what you're doing when running queries, exports and reports and you should take advantage of as much training as you can. At my organization we soft credit spouses for all gifts unless we know of some reason that we shouldn't.

Meg Nygren

@Karen Stuhlfeier Thank you, Karen! I am getting quite familiar with running queries at this point. Appreciate your reply!

Meg Nygren

@Jodi Hofer: Thank you, Jodi! Appreciate the input!

@Meg Nygren Yes, we soft credit a spouse with each gift made unless the donor specifies they don't want the spouse to get credit. It doesn't show double.

Stephen Kerr 2

@Jodi Hofer and @Karen Stuhlfeier, I am working on a report and I am also new to soft credits for all spouses. Is there a way to differentiate the soft credit from those tied to a spouse and those tied to an unrelated individual? Any insight would be appreciated!

Spring Velazquez

@Meg Nygren I would first want to know why you feel you need to give a spouse soft credit? And has not having spouse soft-credit on their record prevented you from completing a critical task? or do you just feel this is something that you have to do because it's a “Best Practice”?

I ask those questions only because, the only organization I worked for where we had a policy of mandating spouse soft credit was in higher ed. Because we did have alumnus married to each other they usually had individual giving history due to undergrad phonathon giving or other giving prior to marrying each other. At the time we credited the spouse with soft credit “in case” they were ever to divorce.

However, I haven't approved a policy to automatically soft credit spouses (and I say this only because in 20+ years, it's literally never been an issue) in at least 15 years because there hasn't been any reason to. I prefer to follow the practice of using soft-credit to identify who influenced the gift-not just because they were married. We utilized other tools to ensure spouses were listed as such (if they wanted to be) instead of adding the headache of having even more soft-credits to consider when reporting, analyzing, acknowledging etc.

For married donors, prior and current policies have been refined over time but usually have the following standard requirements for married donor in NXT:

1. One full constituent for the donor/one non-constituent for the spouse (if/when that information is received)
2. Alias type of Spouse on each record (constituent and non-constituent) with the other spouse name as the value
3. Primary Addressee and Salutation are constituent only
4. Additional addr/sal of Married Addressee and Married Salutation on each record for Constituent/Spouse and for the non-con Spouse/Constituent
5. The non-con's address is shared from the primary spouse's record so it's always linked
6. Staff provided consent event is added of Mail Communication = opt-out/no which also adds the solicit code of Do Not Mail-spouse record

This is also when the training becomes as much about the staff understanding why these pieces are required so they know when or if anything is missing or incorrect and how to add it accurately.

I make sure the policy and procedure instructs staff to add gifts via batch and if the constituent is in our database already and married, a business rule notifies them of that and reminds them to use the “see constituent giving” menu item; review prior giving and relationships and to identify the primary spouse for current and future giving. Usually the decision was made that whoever was the frequent check signer was the one who was “primary”.

The timing of when all of that is added depends if the constituents exist prior to a gift coming in or not. I mean I have scanned and analyzed several databases and have never been able to successfully identify every married couple but the extra 5 minutes to add/update the information is worth the years of headaches that come as a result of soft-credits (IMHO).

Candy Beckwith

@Meg Nygren Soft credits can affect queries, and therefore reports. However, you can decide how you want the query to count soft credits. While in Query, go to the toolbar at the very top and select Tools. Then select Query Options. Then select Gift Processing. You can then choose to soft credit the original donor, the donor with the soft credit, or both. There's also an option on who to credit for matching gifts. So if you put both it will affect your counts. Whether that's good or bad depends on what you are trying to find out.