Soft Credits for individuals, foundations or corporations giving through National Christian Foundation, etc.

Cheryl Segear · October 2017

I am wondering how some of you all enter checks received from foundations such as National Christian Foundation where an individual or company has sent their donations through these entities. We currently hard credit the entity and soft credit the individual or company. The problem we are running into is that when I pull query's for our consultant or Administrator, the data is flawed because if I include the soft credits in the query, NCF and the person that gave is showing up and if I do not include the soft credits, then the data is still inaccurate because it appears that individual X hasn't given when in reality they have. We are using Raiser's Edge and Financial Edge. When I spoke to our controller about this, she told me that the auditors see that check as coming from a foundation therefore it has to be coded as a business check so NCF has to be the one hard credited. Does anyone else out there have this same issue and if so, how are you handling it? There may be a simple answer to this, but most of what I have learned in Raiser's Edge has been through training videos online because we had a major turnover here within the past year. I really appreciate any input!! Thanks so much!

Claudia Sauers · October 2017

Cheryl Segear:

I am wondering how some of you all enter checks received from foundations such as National Christian Foundation where an individual or company has sent their donations through these entities. We currently hard credit the entity and soft credit the individual or company. The problem we are running into is that when I pull query's for our consultant or Administrator, the data is flawed because if I include the soft credits in the query, NCF and the person that gave is showing up and if I do not include the soft credits, then the data is still inaccurate because it appears that individual X hasn't given when in reality they have. We are using Raiser's Edge and Financial Edge. When I spoke to our controller about this, she told me that the auditors see that check as coming from a foundation therefore it has to be coded as a business check so NCF has to be the one hard credited. Does anyone else out there have this same issue and if so, how are you handling it? There may be a simple answer to this, but most of what I have learned in Raiser's Edge has been through training videos online because we had a major turnover here within the past year. I really appreciate any input!! Thanks so much!

Can you utilize the reference line, i.e "Annual Fund Gift-John Smith" that way you have a "quick and dirty" way to see who/why the gift was initiated--which would be helpful for quick queries, gift lookup etc. As far as a more accurate reporting I think you have this capability in export, where you can create a query based on the gift information and under the gift output output the soft credit constituent name.

Claudia Sauers · October 2017

Claudia Sauers:

Cheryl Segear:

I am wondering how some of you all enter checks received from foundations such as National Christian Foundation where an individual or company has sent their donations through these entities. We currently hard credit the entity and soft credit the individual or company. The problem we are running into is that when I pull query's for our consultant or Administrator, the data is flawed because if I include the soft credits in the query, NCF and the person that gave is showing up and if I do not include the soft credits, then the data is still inaccurate because it appears that individual X hasn't given when in reality they have. We are using Raiser's Edge and Financial Edge. When I spoke to our controller about this, she told me that the auditors see that check as coming from a foundation therefore it has to be coded as a business check so NCF has to be the one hard credited. Does anyone else out there have this same issue and if so, how are you handling it? There may be a simple answer to this, but most of what I have learned in Raiser's Edge has been through training videos online because we had a major turnover here within the past year. I really appreciate any input!! Thanks so much!

Can you utilize the reference line, i.e "Annual Fund Gift-John Smith" that way you have a "quick and dirty" way to see who/why the gift was initiated--which would be helpful for quick queries, gift lookup etc. As far as a more accurate reporting I think you have this capability in export, where you can create a query based on the gift information and under the gift output output the soft credit constituent name.

Also I think your way of gift entry is pretty standard as the "entity" is often lawfully the donor as they have already issued a receipt to the individual you are refering to.

Melissa S Graves · October 2017

Legally the gift is from the foundation. RE is AWFUL when it comes to querying and reporting on soft credits. It is a huge issue that we have complained about for years.

Despite what your controller says, however, there are some organizations who have done away with requiring that the gift go on the record of the legal donor - as long as the legal donor is receipted properly there is no reason to require the gift be on the record of the legal donor.

It is a HUGE committment to make this change and it requires a lot of planning to get your processes down. You need to think about things such as (but not limited to):

How to properly receipt the legal donor
How to exclude such gifts from consolidated receipts to the individual
How to properly put these gift into the proper category (foundation vs. individual, etc) on any analysis/reporting/surveys

Many places have used gift attributes to help identify these kinds of gifts and who the legal donor and survey category are. Whatever you plan you need to thoroughly test it. Most of us have not yet gone there because it is a HUGE committment IMHO. So we just suffer with the crap for query options with soft crediting.

Aaron Rothberg · October 2017

Hi Cheryl-

Check out this thread. We no long hard credit donor advised funds (I know you asked about foundations) and we have not found the process change difficult at all. We're following the process outlined in Bill Connors' book which utilizes a Gift Attribute called Name on Check to capture the legal donor. Feel free to PM me if you like more information.

Soft Credits for individuals, foundations or corporations giving through National Christian Foundation, etc.

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