Counting total giving with soft credits and donor advised funds.

Samuel Meinders · September 2017

Hello RE users!

I have been battling an issue when pulling total donors and their giving. I am hoping I am missing a "best practice" strategy. My confusion lies within soft credits for a spouse, business, or donor advised fund (DAF).

I am tasked with creating a 5 year trend analysis for my organization. I will need to see each donor and their total gift #,$ per fiscal year. We have multiple donors in our system who give through several different donor advised funds (DAFs), these individuals are soft credited for their contributions. We also have many individuals who give through their business, and are also soft credited individually for their business gift. Spouses are also soft credited for their Head of Household's giving.

I am looking for a way to separate my DAF individuals from the rest of my database.

- When I pull giving information and credit all gifts to the original donor, I lose those who give through a DAF.

- When I pull giving information and credit all gifts to soft creditees, gifts end up with the spouse or business contact.. but not the original donor.

- Crediting gifts to both parties obviously double counts.

Please direct me on a best practice for this situation, thank you!!

Aaron Rothberg · September 2017

Hi Samuel-

Check out this thread. Most people will say you are following best practice, but after running up against the same issue you described we stopped hard crediting DAFs and we now hard credit the donor that directed the gift and capture the DAF name in a Gift Attribute for our internal auditors. There's some controversary among RE uses about this practice so you'll have to weigh the pros and cons for your organization.

Samuel Meinders · September 2017

Aaron Rothberg:

Hi Samuel-

Check out this thread. Most people will say you are following best practice, but after running up against the same issue you described we stopped hard crediting DAFs and we now hard credit the donor that directed the gift and capture the DAF name in a Gift Attribute for our internal auditors. There's some controversary among RE uses about this practice so you'll have to weigh the pros and cons for your organization.

Thank you, Aaron! I read through that thread and it definitely seems like a heavily debated topic. I appreciate your guidance, and thanks for answering my question.

Christine Cooke 2 · October 2017

Samuel Meinders:

Hello RE users!

I have been battling an issue when pulling total donors and their giving. I am hoping I am missing a "best practice" strategy. My confusion lies within soft credits for a spouse, business, or donor advised fund (DAF).

I am tasked with creating a 5 year trend analysis for my organization. I will need to see each donor and their total gift #,$ per fiscal year. We have multiple donors in our system who give through several different donor advised funds (DAFs), these individuals are soft credited for their contributions. We also have many individuals who give through their business, and are also soft credited individually for their business gift. Spouses are also soft credited for their Head of Household's giving.

I am looking for a way to separate my DAF individuals from the rest of my database.

- When I pull giving information and credit all gifts to the original donor, I lose those who give through a DAF.

- When I pull giving information and credit all gifts to soft creditees, gifts end up with the spouse or business contact.. but not the original donor.

- Crediting gifts to both parties obviously double counts.

Please direct me on a best practice for this situation, thank you!!

Hopefully your protocols for entering this info has been consistent. Otherwise it will be wonky for sure. You need to pull HoH and include soft credits. If you pull the spouse also, you will have double and triple counting.

tt is my belief that In order to keep this type of reporting clean -- you need, as much as possible, have a procedure/protocol in place as who which of the spouses is the HoH consistently. Of course there are one or two exceptions to the rule, that's okay, as long as you stick to it. And then you always SC the spouse that is not HoH. You also should SC spouse records on a DAF, not just the HoH. Same with businesses that are owned by donors and they make the gift through the business.

If you do this, then you can always pull gift info on HoH and include SC for the DAF and biz and come up with consistent info.

Christine Cooke 2 · October 2017

Aaron Rothberg:

Hi Samuel-

Check out this thread. Most people will say you are following best practice, but after running up against the same issue you described we stopped hard crediting DAFs and we now hard credit the donor that directed the gift and capture the DAF name in a Gift Attribute for our internal auditors. There's some controversary among RE uses about this practice so you'll have to weigh the pros and cons for your organization.

agree with HC the donor for the DAF, but from what I've seen in posts throughout time, it appears that is not the majority.

Counting total giving with soft credits and donor advised funds.

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