Soft crediting a donation made through a third party processor

Duane Waite:

Hello everyone!


My manager would like constituents who donated to our marathon team through a third party donation processor to have a "soft credit" donation record in Raiser's Edge. 

I was thinking of defining a special gift type, but I'm puzzled on the best way to enter the donation amount so it isn't double counted when we run our donation reports.


I would, however, like to be able to run a soft credit report that could tell us who donated how much, since when the receipts from the third processor come in, all donations are lumped together into one total amount. A gift attribute was my thought but throwing the question out here might give me some better ideas.


Thanks in advance!

Beth Jarrett:

Alicia Cornett:

Duane Waite:

Hello everyone!


My manager would like constituents who donated to our marathon team through a third party donation processor to have a "soft credit" donation record in Raiser's Edge. 

I was thinking of defining a special gift type, but I'm puzzled on the best way to enter the donation amount so it isn't double counted when we run our donation reports.


I would, however, like to be able to run a soft credit report that could tell us who donated how much, since when the receipts from the third processor come in, all donations are lumped together into one total amount. A gift attribute was my thought but throwing the question out here might give me some better ideas.


Thanks in advance!

Greetings Duane,


We soft credit third party gifts all the time. We put the gift in the donor record (the one providing the providing the payment). If you are using Raiser's Edge the third tab in the gift record is soft credit. There we enter the constituent name and the amount that we want to reflect the soft credit. A SC-gift will appear on the soft credited constituents record but will not be duplicated on your donation reports. We don't run a soft credit report but I would think that you could build a report using a query and just query on those gifts. I wouldn't use a gift attribute because I believe that would cause some duplication on reporting. But I've never tried it so I'm not 100% sure.


Hope that helps give some direction. 

 

I  typically issue a soft credit to the donor who made the initial request and the hard credit to the third party giving orgs because they wrote the check. That way we can steward the donors and our business office can

have an audit trail back to the donor from the company who issued the check. I can see the benefit in doing it the other way as well - so you are looking at the true donors and not the middleman, but the point about utilizing the soft credit to "link" the parties is what I think is key. You would not get that with an attribute. Also, gift attributes can be easy to forget. My two cents, for what it's worth!

Hi Duane,

We always post to the person or organization that issued the check and then will soft-credit. I'm not sure what soft-credit report you are referring to but many reports give you the option to soft-credit both and "use distribution on gift" to avoid double counting the amount.  If you have separate records for donors and spouses, you may need to create a "Head of Household" query so that your marrried constituents are not duplicated.

 

Hi Duane,

A few notes I need to keep in mind when soft crediting. 1. On nearly all reports and queries you can choose whether to include the donor, the soft credit, or both. If you pick "both" your queries and reports will count gifts twice. 2. When gathering lists of donors, for example, to invite to an event, I sometimes want the primary donor (when the soft credit is a subsidiary donor), and sometimes want the soft credited donor (when the soft credit is the person who recommended a gift from a donor-advised fund). I have read on the forums that some folks set up soft crediting procedures so that it functions as desired (even if they do not fit the definition): for example, the soft credit constituent is ALWAYS the one that gets pulled for a given purpose. 

best, Jill