DAFs, soft credits and recognition in donor lists

Julie Klett · March 2016

When we receive a donation from a donor advised fund, we hard-credit the DAF and soft-credit the "advisor". We send a thank you and receipt to the DAF and a thank you letter to the advisor for recommending the gift. We list all of our donors in our newsletter and have been trying to do the following:

Fund X:

- Captain Jean Luc Picard (straight/direct gift)

- Boulder Community Foundation/Captain James T. Kirk (DAF/recommending soft-credited person)

My questions:

1. How is your organization handling recognizing these DAF gifts, say in newsletters and the like? We want to be sure that we acknowledge the soft-credited recommending person(s).

2. If you are including the soft-credited person in a donor list, how on earth are you getting that information to pull for you when you run a gift query/report? We have been including soft-credit information in the Reference field, but that is getting to be problematic as it requires a lot of hand-editing and is prone to errors.

Thank you!

shani traum · March 2016

I need to double check this with the person who actually pulls the data for our listings, but I'm pretty sure we only list the soft-credited donor, not the DAF (so Kirk would be listed, but not Boulder Community Fund) since the Fund is only the conduit, not really the donor.

She pulls the report based on soft-credit recipient, not where the hard credit lives (given this is a donor listing, not a financial report).

JoAnn Strommen · March 2016

For our donor list, we list the "DAF - name of person who advised".

We have an add/sal on individual records for Recognition-Annual Fund, one for Recognition - Endowment, etc. Specific preferred listing is entered when info received on pledge form or it goes to our default format. For orgs, we have alias with same title and just copy and paste fund name in and add person. For reports/listings we run an export of that addressee and that alias. Works for us.

Jen Claudy · March 2016

We have an Attribute on every record that holds the Donor Listing...with the Date indicating when it was last edited, and the Comment including instructions (or "see ConstNote" for lengthier explanations).

For your example, we may end up listing both, since they are different names. But if it's a gift from the Robert C. Hernandez Fund (for us, it would more than likely be "of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation") and the soft-credit is to Robert Hernandez, we would list the donor as "Robert C. Hernandez *" and the footnote on the list would say "* indicates a gift received via the Greater Cincinnati Foundation". We don't like to list both in this case, because it appears to be a duplicate as both would sort under Hernandez. It's a bit of work, but I've devised a system that works for me (and some of it is automated, using MS Access).

For newsletters, we would just send to both...soft-credits are included in those list pulls.

Debra Holcomb · March 2016

If you question is "How do you get the list?", we use the Donor Category Report found under Analytical Reports. This report captures both hard and soft credit (and notates which is which) and sorts by name within the donor levels you create. You can also use the report to create a query that you then use as the basis for other output. Any output you intend to print will always require significant review.

We print the names of individuals in one section of our Honor Wall and Corportations/Foundations in a separate section.

DAFs, soft credits and recognition in donor lists

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