Alternatives to Soft Crediting?

Chloe Heintz · November 2016

Hi all-

I am wondering if you have alternative business rules to take the place of soft crediting practices? I'm interested in creative ideas overall but also want to run a scenario by you. I believe our soft crediting policy is sound but our leadership team is not satisfied with how gifts appear, particularly for board members. Apologies if this is long winded.

Our organization has a give/get for our board members. Some of them have individual records, family foundation records, and also give through their company (which also has a record). Revenue is tracked based on how it came in, and the board member is soft-credited for any money they personally did not give. This is all fairly straightforward I think. Some board members focus heavily on the Get portion, though, and in particular buy several tables at our gala and then expect their various guests to donate throughout the evening. When we soft-credit those Text to Pledges (sidebar. I hate TTP...) it can sometimes end up being 20-40 soft-credited transactions on a single board member's gift tab.

When trying to report on a board member's give/get for the year, this is more complicated than simply saying "All soft credits are Gets." Their family foundation would be a Give, for example, so I am in the position where you can't just glance at a record and see where people are at. We end up reporting on every gift and then sorting manually from there.

One option I've explored is making board members gift solicitors and instead of soft-crediting them for their Get, make them the solicitor of the gift. I worry how this will impact reporting, though (particularly for our president, who only uses NXT and then would not see those soft-credited gifts appearing on the constituent record).

Another option might be to forgo the soft crediting and instead create a Give/Get pledge at the beginning of the year, and simply apply those gets against the pledge. You could see the pledge installments on the Pledge record, but again you would not see the soft credits appear on the constituent record.

Have any of you dealt with this? I don't want to create a new process to simplify viewing of records if it's not ideal for financial or analytical reporting, so I'm hoping to play out these or any scenarios I haven't thought of.

Thanks!

Chloe

JoAnn Strommen · November 2016

We use solicitor assignments as we feel it is much cleaner and more accurate than SCing board members for gifts they asked for but really don't 'own' the money. That has to do with our definition/purpose for SC. If we ever go to lifetime giving I sure wouldn't want to have to go back and filter out someway all the "ask" gifts from the real SC gifts.

We don't use NXT so don't know what those limitations might be. May be you'd just need to go to solicitor analysis reports.

My 2 cents...

Jen Claudy · November 2016

I would use Solicitor Assignments for this. Set up each of your board members as a Solicitor and your president can see their Work Center in NXT to keep an eye on what's coming in from which board member. The Pledge idea is interesting, but I think, especially with NXT Analysis Reporting, you'll get into trouble there because you can't just filter out Gifts (or Pledges, in this case) with a certain Attribute. At least not yet. NXT Gift Lists also have Solicitor (or Fundraiser) Filters which should work for your president.

Also, this setup would work if you have board members who are interested in using NXT directly...they can add Actions and Notes (while soliciting gifts and/or as thank yous after the donations are in), see the totals of what gifts have come in from their constituents, etc.

Daniel Bayer · December 2016

Yeah, as has been said, adding the Board Members as Solicitor is the way to go. And now, since I was just talking with a colleague about this, here is a slightly more in-depth discussion of the matter of soft credits VS. solicitors.

Soft credits, in my view, are for things like DAFs or spouse giving - the soft credited person didn't give the gift themselves but are closely related enough where those gifts should be seen on their record, as part of their giving total, etc. It's more appropriate to put someone as a solicitor on a gift when they, well, solicited the gift themselves. They wouldn't get any tax-related credit for the gift, and it probably wouldn't be included in their gift totals for a donor listing, but the gift came in as a direct result of them asking for it.

The pledge idea you have is interesting, but I would only do it if you include the "get" part of their give/get as part of their own giving total.

Gracie Schild · December 2016

Hi - we have basically stopped using soft credit completely, especially for DAFs. We had way too many reporting issues and kept listing "Fidelity Charitable Fund" or similar as donors, when they really aren't. We moved instead to a different type of batch entry that we call "pass-through" which places the gift on the person who "sent" the gift rather than the org that processed it. We set the master batch with a default receipt amount of $0 and with the Gift Code as an available field (which we weren't using for anything else) to be filled in as "Fidelity", "Schwab", "United Way of Northern NM", or "***EDIT***" (in that case we make a note on the gift of the name of the pass-through bank or org).. We then created an acknowledgement letter for these gifts that says "Thank you for designating a gift of <Gift Amount> from <Gift Code> to the <Fund Description>. The gift was received on <Gift Date>." There is no tax blurb or receipt amount, but the latter is critical for the annual summaries.

We count spouses as a single constituent/household and don't separate the crediting unless there is a good reason. We are an art institute as well as a tribal college, so we often have the issue of both husband and wife being artists who donate to our annual auction, and/or one is faculty or staff and the other is an alumnus/almuna. Yikes. I have wanted for some time to split such couples into two but have it possible to mail to them both for general appeals, but separately for the "art ask", and give them joint credit for cash gifts (as we do every other couple) but separate credit for art gifts - but I'm getting a headache just writing about it, so I'll push it back again!!

Debra Holcomb · December 2016

Like Gracie, we similarily place donor-advised fund and any other third-party gift (those processed through another vendor on behalf of the donor) on the constituent's record. This makes reporting clean; cultivation, soliciting and stewarding the relationship much easier; and still allows for correct receipting of gifts.

We use the solicitor field to track gifts our board members have encouraged and use dashboards to view that info quickly.

Chloe Heintz · December 2016

Hi everybody - thank you for this! I will be moving forward with a Solicitor type of Board Solicitor as many of you are doing. Glad to hear this is a reasonable solution. Also quite looking forward to use of the Dashboards and Reports to analyze. I really see this affecting our soft-credits only in regard to our volunteer leadership.

Regarding soft crediting more generally, I'm doing a version of what many of you are doing:

money from DAFs goes on the constituent (donor's) record. There is a gift attribute called Name on Check, which is set as a table. While I occasionally need to add new table values, that's rare, and having it this way rather than narrative prevents variable entries and makes it easier for our gift entry person to key through. We used to have records for all the DAFs and several historical gifts still live there but I've become convinced that there's absolutely no reason (IRS or otherwise) that we would have to deal with these pass-through donations in any other way.
We have independent records for each spouse. This was necessitated by a pending RELO integration with Luminate Online. It has caused some issues occasionally but the householding process is alright once you get the hang of it. Querying for mailing lists is significantly more complex, if you want to make sure all of the right people (and none of the wrong) are included. It's one of those ways in which I feel good about my skill-set, though, and the added functionality includes the ability to track individual engagement etc. (for instance, though they're married, Susan comes to our events, but Joanne donates, now we can track!).

Alternatives to Soft Crediting?

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