Automatically Soft Credit this Organization for Gifts - Backdating Soft Credit?

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Amelia Ketzle
Amelia Ketzle
Fifth Anniversary 100 Comments 25 Likes Name Dropper
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion

Hi, everyone -

We went live on RENXT last year and are now interested in selectively utilizing the checkbox on Org Relationships > General 2 tab which allows for soft crediting a parent organization for any gifts made by its subsidiaries (at least, that's how we would use it). However, according to KB article 48273, this checkbox only begins adding soft credit going forward, and since many of our org records already have gifts on them, checking this box won't get us a total recognition credit on the parent org. In fact, it seems like it might be worse to check this than not, since when the time comes to calculate total recognition credit for an honor roll, we won't know exactly when that checkbox was checked, and so what the cutoff was for included soft credit vs. soft credit we still need to add in manually. Has anyone else dealt with this, and if so, how? One possibility is to go back and add soft credit to each existing transaction on the subsidiary to the parent org, but in many cases, that is a lot of gifts. I wondered if there might be a plugin to expedite this process, but I didn't see anything. What experiences/suggestions do you all have with this issue?

Many thanks in advance for your assistance!

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  • Austen Brown
    Austen Brown Community All-Star
    Ninth Anniversary 2,500 Likes 1000 Comments Photogenic

    Hi Amelia - You can add soft credits in bulk by utilizing the Export/Import feature. When preparing to run this import make sure you have the Import ID of the gift in question, and the Import ID for the constituent you want to receive the soft credit. To learn more about the process specifics, check out KB Article #46387.

  • Amelia Ketzle
    Amelia Ketzle
    Fifth Anniversary 100 Comments 25 Likes Name Dropper

    Thank you, @Austen Brown ! I'm not sure how to construct the import file, beyond the basics, I mean. I might need to do a Relationship Query & Export to identify all the parent org records of all the subsidiaries with hard credit (Gift Amount > $0), and then do a Gift Query (limited to those records identified in the Relationship Query) and then export the appropriate credit to be applied for each gift. Lots to think about…

  • Austen Brown
    Austen Brown Community All-Star
    Ninth Anniversary 2,500 Likes 1000 Comments Photogenic

    I would recommend you start small, pick one subsidiary and parent record first; test out the process on one gift record and then work your way up from there.

    Here are few things you need to know for importing data in RE, as I am not sure how familiar you are with the process:

    • The import file needs to be a CSV, you can either create one from scratch or launch Excel and save the new document with the type CSV.
    • The top row of your import needs to list the ‘Import Name’ for each field rather than the display name (I've attached a copy of the BB_Import_User_Manual.pdf, this is crucial to figuring out required import fields and their names; check out page 254-255 for Gift Soft Credit Fields)
    • There is a specific Import type for Gift Soft Credits (Admin > Import > Gift > Soft Credit) or you can run it through a general Gift Import (Admin > Import > Gift); if this your first import in this area, you will need to click on the “New” button.
    • Validate your import prior to running it, every time.
    • General advice: Always double check that what you are importing is correct. Imports can be difficult to reverse if you get them wrong. This type of import should not be a big deal, but it doesn't hurt to be extra careful.

    If you run into any hiccups on long way, feel free to send me a message I'm happy to help; I have run this import a number of times. Good luck!

  • Tatyana Leifman
    Tatyana Leifman
    Tenth Anniversary 25 Likes 10 Comments Photogenic
    This is a great bullet point list Austen Brown‍ . I would just add, from experience, that in addition to always validating before importing (and if something needed to be fixed, validating again, no matter how small the change needed to be made), always create an output query. It can prove invaluable if you need to later add additional information to these records or if something needs to be changed on them after the import.

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