Managing Donor Advised Funds in RE

Jessica Thrift 2 · January 2018

We have, like many of you, a variety of donations that come from organizations that are directed by individuals - donor-advised funds. I feel confident about how we create these records, how we soft-credit the gifts, etc. But the next "step" in the relationship is causing problems for me. It's about stewardship and the next solicitation. I want to find a way to correctly steward and solicit those people for their next gift and NOT the organizations. I want to create something in RE to identify the DAF organizations so I can exclude them from stewardship and solicitation, and also write a procedure that will ensure the individual donor is appropriately stewarded and solicited (e.g. if we soft credit correctly every single time, and we use soft credits when calculating giving criteria for solicitation and stewardship pieces, the individuals should qualify for those communications. I am considering a few different DAF solutions: an attribute? a solicitation code? a constituent code?

Has anyone done something that worked particularly well, or even something that worked particularly poorly (so I can avoid it)? Thanks in advance for your wisdom!

shani traum · January 2018

So, until this Fiscal year, gifts were entered on the record of the Org sending the check (Fidelity, Federation, Schwab Charitable, etc) and soft crediting the gift to the donor.

This caused many reporting annoyances including having to worry about double counting household giving when both spouses have records and therefore both are soft credited for a gift or knowing which gifts are from Fidelity itself vs from a Fidelity DAF.

We now enter the gift on the donor record (soft crediting to the spouse as necessary) and add a gift attribute called DAF Organization to the gift. There is an associated table of the various organizations sending in checks from which to select the correct one so that reports can be pulled as necessary. So, far, so good.

Doing something like this would address your issue, I think. Gifts live on the donor record so you know who you're stewarding, soliciting, assigning Prospect Managers, etc.

Jessica Thrift 2 · January 2018

Thanks for responding, Shani. How do you handle the gift when it comes in without the donor information, either because it is anonymous or because the community foundation takes 2-3 weeks to send the donor information to you?

shani traum:

So, until this Fiscal year, gifts were entered on the record of the Org sending the check (Fidelity, Federation, Schwab Charitable, etc) and soft crediting the gift to the donor.

JoAnn Strommen · January 2018

We use a constituent code of Donor Advised for the records. Either an attriubte or solicit code will work to exclude them from solicitations. We use an attribute as that is what we are already using for coding use in solicitations.

Aaron Rothberg · January 2018

We do something similar to Shani's organization. We have a gift attribute called Name on Check (Bill Connor's suggestion) which gets populated for DAF gifts and also some non-DAF gifts. Basically if the name on the check doesn't match the donor we're giving credit for the gift, Name on Check is populated. At the end of the year when I issue year-end receipts, I query on Name on Check <Not Blank> to find all gifts that were given by someone other than the donor so I can generate those letters manually. We also enter a receipt amount of zero for DAF gifts to guard against giving the donor tax credit. So far this has worked great for us.

You can also find a pretty long conversation about the subject in this thread.

Managing Donor Advised Funds in RE

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