Business Donor with a Foundation

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Martha Spiegel
Martha Spiegel ✭
Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
We have a local business which has donated to us for many years. A couple of years ago they formed a foundation, and all of their charitable gifts are now paid with foundation checks rather than business checks. We include them in a lot of correspondence and mailings. Typically the mailings are addressed to the CEO at "Business Name" while gift acknowledgements are addressed to the CEO (same person) at "Foundation Name." They are listed in our annual report under the Foundation name. The mailing address is the same. I'm not sure if I should set up a separate record, since we wouldn't want to send 2 mailings to the same address, or just continue to manually change the name depending on the situation. I will remember to do this, but my concern is about future people in my position. Any suggestions?
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  • Cheryl Cummings
    Cheryl Cummings ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic
    In these types of instances, I always say the same thing as your CFO or accountant might say - Follow the money. If the check is from the Foundation, apply the gift and relevant relationships for acknowledgments, etc. to the Foundation record. It is fine to have the two different records at the same address, as that is the real and current situation. We do this all the time. RE has plenty of ways to manage mail, etc, so no one has to "remember" any special circumstances. Use your solicit codes and/or attributes to ensure the correct people get the correct mail at the appropriately named organization. In some cases, there are different contacts for the business side and the foundation side, so it can be clear and useful to have the two records. Make sure there they have a reciprocal relationship, so people can see the interconnectivity of the two records for a comprehensive history. You can soft credit the recent giving to the other record, if you need to see all gifts in one place. Best of luck - these are great challenges to have! :-)
  • Amy Matthews
    Amy Matthews Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
    I would also recommend having two records: one for the business and one for the foundation.  Right now, the contact info and mailing info is the same, but that might change at some point in the future.  If you're not keen on setting up automatic soft credits between the two records (depending on how your org uses them elsewhere), you can also make the business the assigned solicitor of the foundation so they get "credit" for raising those funds - if you need to pull a comprehensive report. 
  • Martha Spiegel
    Martha Spiegel ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1
    It does seem like having 2 records is the way to go. Is there a way to change the gifts already credited to the business to credit the foundation, or do I have to manually delete and re-enter them? There aren't too many yet, so I could manually re-enter the gifts, but if there is a way to "re-credit" them there would be less room for error.
  • Dina Ellis
    Dina Ellis ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply
    Hi Martha - in regards to your question about manually re-creating the gifts on the foundation record: I would suggest that you just do a partial merge.  At our institution, we run into this situation every now and then; and if you have determined that all of the gifts on the business record can be moved, then merging is a great tool.  First we export the constituent record that is to be merged (that way there is at least a snapshot of the 'before').  Then we merge just the Gifts (it will select all of them by default) from one record to the other.  Finally, we document the change on both of the records for historical purposes.

    Hopefully that works for you!

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