Soft credit to an Endowment

Anne Smith

We are adding the endowment/scholarship fund as a soft credit to the constituent record for their donation. I think they did this so they can see the $$ in the fund. Is there a better way to do this, it is very time consuming to enter soft credits to all the gifts we get.

Dariel Dixon 2

@Anne Smith I'm not certain I'm following the logic? Is this to determine who can request endowment details and reports? I don't understand why a soft credit is needed. RE should not be used to report balances, as there are fees and other financial data that generally doesn't flow through into RE.

JoAnn Strommen

@Anne Smith I'm not sure I'm following either. If gift is entered into the endowment fund you should be able to report on the fund activity to see all the gifts entered.

I think you may end up with a mess in the long tern when running reports. You can link the creator of the endowment with a relationship to the fund if that's part of the reason you are doing SC.

I would give this serious reconsideration. Maybe you can clarify exactly what entering SC would do for you. To soft credit do you have each endowment/fund as a constituent?

Anne Smith

@JoAnn Strommen, the VP of our department would like to see all the gifts given to an endowment through webview. We have all endowments set up as constituents and they also have a fund number. I was just thinking there has to be an easier way to see the gifts and not have to worry about soft crediting the constituent organization for each gift.

Anne Smith

@Dariel Dixon
I don't either but this is not may call. I am trying to save myself time and not having to clean up the records every couple of months. See the message I posted to JoAnn Strommen about why I asked this question.

JoAnn Strommen

@Anne Smith You should be able to run a report on your endowed funds to see all/any of the gifts made and and where they came from. For us it's based on our gift codes. You can use a gift code, gift sub-type or gift attribute to record when gift is entered and then pull that data for reports.

Dariel Dixon 2

@Anne Smith:

@JoAnn Strommen, the VP of our department would like to see all the gifts given to an endowment through webview. We have all endowments set up as constituents and they also have a fund number. I was just thinking there has to be an easier way to see the gifts and not have to worry about soft crediting the constituent organization for each gift.

I think there are better ways to do this. Perhaps a dashboard would be better. I think that would solve your issue, as you can set a dashboard to just look at a specific set of funds. If you do not have the proper permissions to create them, then this is a great time to request them.

You are definitely creating more trouble for yourself with all of these soft credits. It can create a lot of confusion; will you report on the fund record or the constituent record? Your organization has determined that there is some business case for creating constituent records for these endowments. However, the type of reporting that you've been requested to do is much easier as a fund report.

Granted, a canned cash receipts/gift summary report would be easier, but obviously your VP doesn't care for database view.

Karen Diener 2

@Anne Smith This is a lot of extra work on you, and potentially adding a lot of clutter in the database. I completely agree with Dariel and JoAnn.

I've heard of Organizations setting up endowments as constituent records, and I don't have a big issue with that. I set up named spaces and naming opportunities as constituent records and it was incredibly useful. But it needs to be done right. When Organizations do that, it is solely for stewardship purposes. That is not where the gifts are recorded.

If your gift coding structure has a Fund for each endowment, your VP's need is met with a simple gift list in webview.

Gather some information on this and try to push back to the VP. Dariel co-presented at BBCON about this kind of issue - you might say “no” to this exact request, but you are saying “no” only because you can offer a better solution. Your VP does not know RE the way you do.

Continue coming back to us for help if you need!

Karen

Dariel Dixon 2

I don't either but this is not may call. I am trying to save myself time and not having to clean up the records every couple of months.

I really don't like that you feel resigned to this. This feeling is why @Katherine Mannion and I did our session that @Karen Diener referenced. While it's not your decision, that does not mean that you should not have any input on it. There's ways to resolve this. Hopefully, your VP is receptive to your input.

I don't know if I'm saying (typing) the unspoken part or not, but I think that organizational culture needs to be taken into consideration. I'm not sure how long you have been in your position @Anne Smith or how long you've been with the organization, but you know better than any of us what approach to take. You can take measurement of how this will be received, but regardless know that you are not powerless and that your input is not only important but necessary, even if others don't see it.

Anne Smith

@Dariel Dixon They do not use database view. Only a couple of people do. Most of the office works on webview. So set up the dashboard to see the funds. Since I work mostly in database view and not web view, I will have to see if I can set up this report. Thank you all for your input.

Anne Smith

@Karen Diener I meant how do you set up the naming spaces and organizations? Thanks!

Karen Diener 2

@Anne Smith:

@Karen Diener I meant how do you set up the naming spaces and organizations? Thanks!

It was done in "The Times Before we were Charged by Number of Constituents" so I'm not 100% sure I would advocate for that now. But I was with a hospital foundation in the midst of a capital campaign to build a new hospital. We needed to track our existing named spaces in the old building, and named spaces for the new one.

All were constituent records, and we used a variety of attributes to refine the location, visibility, size, “price”, etc. It was a great tool for our donor stewardship and major gift teams to reference. If they were planning to ask someone for a $2m gift, they could do an easy search to identify spaces that they could name for that gift.

We did a mini “ribbon cutting" events where families could see their new space once it was completed, and used the event module to track the event and who was there. The named space was always part of the event too. We used Relationships to indicate if the space was in honor of someone, and who were the funders of the space. It is all becoming a little blurry now because it was a few years ago. I did present on it at BBCON in maybe 2011?

Karen