Matching Gift Entry from Foundation

Christie Michals

We're in a capital campaign and obtained a 1:1 matching grant from a foundation that will provide the funds only after we've successfully raised the requested amount. My boss does not want to list this gift record as a pledge because we will only receive the foundation's funds if we can raise the amount first. I can't find enough information about MG Pledge and MG Pay-Cashes but hope someone here can help clarify how these can be used. If anyone could provide a suggestion or guidance about how to record this information in RE, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

JoAnn Strommen

@Christie Michals Congrats on the nice match. Terminology can be an issue. Yes, it is a match but it is not a “matching gift” using the RE definition of MG. In RE, a MG is a gift most often from my employer that matches what I give.

While you could think of this grant as a matching gift, it is conditional as you mentioned and not based on relationship with the donor.

What I've seen/we've done for this type. First, if it's conditional, do you want it in RE and pulling on reports? We have used a separate fund to hold pledge info and sometimes partial payment until all the $ is collected and then moved funds into appropriate account. This way it was not reported as income in the fund reports until we wanted it to show. We had a specific appeal and could run report on money raised to know if we had reached the goal for the conditional match.

If you decide to run it as an RE MG, you would need to create a matching gift record on every payment/pledge that comes into the account to the org offering the match. When the goal is reached and you enter the payment, you would need to select each of the MG pledges and apply payment to it.

Just my thoughts.

Dariel Dixon 2

I'm with @JoAnn Strommen on this one. These types of gifts aren't true matching gifts in the RE vein. Generally, I don't enter them as gifts until the match is satisfied. That said, actions/notes are good for the initial data entry while the match conditions are being met.

Matching Gifts in RE are more for corporate matching gift programs, as in these cases, the conditions for the gift are already satisfied (outside of the employee filling out the form which you can't do anything about). They are used as placeholders, as matching gifts can take a very long time to arrive.

Dina Rieman

@Christie Michals Hi Christie, we use gift attributes on the gifts that count toward the match. It's really easy to run a gift list in webview on these attributes/custom fields to track the progress of the match. Once we meet the match, then we add a pledge to RE or the cash gift if that comes in right away. Hope this helps.

Faith Murray

@Christie Michals, we also use either a dedicated Fund or else a Gift Code to earmark gifts that qualify for a match, so that it is easy to pull tallies (Dynamic Gift query linked to Report) and see how close we are. We don't enter the match grant itself until it has been raised and received, because sometimes (as in the case of a large capital campaign) it can take up to a year to raise the required funds, and can even cross over into a different fiscal year … and, as others have iterated, it's conditional. I would keep this as a Proposal on the Grantor's record so you have some record of it in RE until it is fulfilled.