DAF Gift entry and recognition

Drakea Brehon

What are best practices for recording DAF funds and how do you distinguish donors for reporting/tax acknowledgements/receipts? Do you code the hard credit under the Entity and soft credit donors? Is there a unique identifier for DAFs? How are donors extracted from the system for reporting and acknowledgements, so they receive proper acknowledgement and the entity does not receive the credit.

Moira Udinski

@Drakea Brehon We record the donation under the Entity with a No Thank You Letter. We used a User Defined Field on the Gift Info to identify it as a Donor Advised Gift on the Entity journal entry. We soft credit the donor and send them an Acknowledgement Letter and thanking them for the donation we received from their Entity. On the donor soft credit journal entry we enter a SC Letter and extract by running a query on that SC Letter.

Amber Salvage 2

@Drakea Brehon We hard credit the DAF or Financial institution and soft credit the donor. We acknowledge the donor ie soft creditor since the donation is being made by them through the DAF.

Acknowledgements are the bane of my existence though when it comes to soft credits. I just took over as database admin/gift processor about 6 months ago at my institution, so I am new to the RE systems but have a background in data science, finance, and have used other database systems. The last gift processor had been here for 20+ years and did everything manually! So I have been trying to bring our procedures more up to date and automating what processes I can. Currently I have a query set up to pull both hard & soft credit gift/constituent information that I export to an csv, match the soft credited donor to the gift information, copy the cleaned data into an excel table, and use mail merge from there. We do list the DAF on the acknowledgement letter stating this gift was made through "Name of DAF”.

To note, we are using RE7 and are FINALLY moving to NXT. If anyone out there has any processes that make acknowledgement letters easier for soft credit gifts, I would greatly appreciate any input!

Marilyn Field 2

@Drakea Brehon At my Canadian org, we record the donation under the entity that provided the physical funding, in this case, the issuing Donor Advised Fund (DAF). Because the DAF is not eligible for a receipt, we record the full amount under the Non-Deductible amount, thus eliminating the concern of a tax receipt. We issue the Soft Credit to the actual donor's account and list the recognition on the gift as what we want to acknowledge the recognition to be (eg: Donor Fund at XXX Foundation/3rd Party) as per the donation instructions. I hope this helps. Please let me know if you want to discuss further, or if I need to clarify anything.

Please note we use eTapestry, not RE.