Entering Gifts from Network for Good, GiveMN, Benevity

I'm not so sure we disagree--the method you describe sounds agreeable to me, since you mentioned that you are not giving the "pseudo-donor" tax credit. To me, that is the main sticking point: That the person or organization who gets legal recognition for a contribution actually made that contribution, and that the data in RE: is always stored in such a way that we can easily tell that. Everything else is window dressing. We also avoid Soft Credits like the plague. We don't have such an elaborate setup as Gracie describes, but we do issue thank-you letters, minus the tax info, which we take out manually, for gifts that ultimately reached us through other channels, and not just things like Network For Good, Benevity, etc. We've also been known to list contributions a bit differently in places like our Dinner booklet or annual donor listings than they actually happened on the books, and this is all about giving credit to the intention for the sake of fostering relationships. That I get, and there's no conflict there.


I actually like the system Gracie describes, as it provides a very good way of keeping track of whose impulse or intention was behind the gift, which serves great purpose in a general Development sense, but little to no purpose when it comes to acknowledging a tax-deductible contribution. I have had to learn through word-of-mouth much of what Gracie's process captures in RE:--that is, which name goes with which company, and when this company gives us money, it's actually a gift from so-and-so; I give kudos there and may look to adopt a similar system.




 

 

Hi Rebecca - the only person/organization who gets "credit" for these pass-throughs is the person who designated the gift. These are cash gifts (as opposed to in-kind or stock or whatever) so we record them as such. We record that the check came from Network for Good, or Schwab Charitable, or United Way - whoever wrote the check, but we do it on the "Gift Code" field, which we weren't using for anything else.  We have table entries for that field of Schwab Charitable Fund, Fidelity Charitable Fund, United Way of ***EDIT***, and ***EDIT***, amongst other common local ones. This field is inserted into the Pass Through Acknowledgement letter.  The ***EDIT*** is to catch the eye of the person printing the letters so that we can insert whatever third party we need to.  If ***EDIT*** is in the field, we also enter the full name of the third party in the Notepad Description (and Type= Passthrough entity) on the gift. The letter says something like "Thank you for designating [Gift Amount] to the [Fund] through [Gift Code, i.e. check-writing entity]. The donation was received on [Gift Date]."  There is no tax-blurb.  We have a similar letter for matching gifts.


We always "load" an existing master batch appropriate to the gifts - Pass Through, Membership, In Kind, Gala In Kind, General, and Trust.  In the Pass Through Master, the letter is set to be the one mentioned above, the Gift Code is a field that needs to be filled in, the Receipt Amount is preset to $0, but the payment information (usually a buisness check), the campaign, fund, appeal, etc., are entered in the usual fashion. The $0 receipt amount shows on the donor's annual reports, so we can "credit" them with the gift without giving them any tax credit.  So far, we've never had a problem with Schwab or whomever calling and saying they need a receipt - indeed, they don't want one and say so.  And we don't list them in donor lists because we don't have a relationship with the third-party - we have a relationship with the person who designated the gift. You wouldn't credit the local bank for the donation checks written by donors who have accounts there, would you? Same thing applies to Schwab and Co.


The one wrinkle that has just come up for the first time here is IRA distributions.  I need to research that a little (and immediately!) to make sure I don't send out the wrong kind of receipt to the wrong party!!


This system solves almost all problems for us and allows us to basically NEVER use soft-credits.  It gets a little sticky when a family foundation gives a gift on the suggestion of a family member who is also a constituent - we've solved it by crediting the gift to the foundation but not making it a member of our giving circle, but rather the person who suggested the gift. There are so few problems like this and we are such a small shop that we can catch that.  Clearly, it might not work for larger organizations. For crediting donors in weird situations like this, I created a Const Attribute called "FLAG - Recognition List" and a query to capture them, so that we can manually add or subtract the constituents, or change their level, when creating lists.


I hope that long-winded explanation helps. I wish I could claim credit for all of those good ideas, but our super trainer/consultant, Ed Hohlbein, helped me think this through and set it up. One of the first things I learned from Ed was to take advantage of the flexibility of RE to do what your organization needs - and this is the perfect application of that theory!