Head of Household Processing Question

Dan Kirk · February 2018

Greetings!

This might be a tad confusing, but let's say there is a married couple in RE, Jane and Jim. Jane is marked as Head of Household. Jane writes a $5000 check and receives the hard credit. Jim is soft credited. Jim writes his own (separate) $5000 check. Jane is soft credited.

Now, let's say that a different constituent, Bob Smith has his own foundation. Bob's foundation donates $10,000. Bob is soft credited.

Follow me so far?

Here is the question. Is there a way create one single export using RE export, so that the results appear like this:

Jim and Jane: $10,000

Bob's foundation: $10,000

Bob: $0

I don't think this can be done, but I want to confirm before coming up with a workaround. Essentially, I want to generate hard credit totals to avoid duplication of dollars, but I want to do it with households together.

Thanks!

Dan

shani traum · February 2018

That would be lovely, but, I don't think so.What we do is...

In the export, do Summary Giving as Soft Credit to Donor

Pull either Jim or Jane as your Constir and include in your export both Constit Giving and Spousal summary giving. Then total the Consit Giving and Spousal Giving once you have the export.

I think the only way to get the Foundation to appear on the export but with $0 is to build your query to have gifts be soft credit to both (Both Bob and his foundation will be included) and then on the export, have the summary giving be Soft Credit to Donor, so Bob gets the credit and the Foundation does not.

Ryan Hyde · February 2018

Yeah, that's a big 'ol nope. And it's because of the fact that RE only handles soft credits in a binary state - either they exist or they do not. They can't be handled more granularly than that, which is why some big names in our industry (Bill Connors comes to mind) actively advocate against using soft credits for anything other than spouses. If Bill were here, he'd suggest to you that the foundation gift should be hard credited to Bob, and the fact that it is from a foundation should exist within the coding structure of the gift because there's lots of flexibility there (maybe a special attribute, or a special gift subtype, or type of 'other' and package 'foundation,' whatever you want).

Givent that that's not going to happen, it seems your only option is to find a way for Bob and other donors like him to not show up in the query that you're piping into export. This is likely to be very, very fiddly to do, but it may be possible if there's something unique about how foundation gifts are coded.

Head of Household Processing Question

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