FundSvcs Community

Hi all,

We are a Raiser's Edge shop and soft credit liberally in our K-12 donor base. We currently go with the conventional wisdom and hard credit the donor advised fund (or family foundation) and soft credit multiple records (head of household and also the spouse and sometimes children and sometimes multiple heads of households). This has led to trouble finding actual donor counts, participation rates, donor constituency reports...etc. We are pondering the big change to reverse the DAF hard credit to the main donor (i.e. the alumni, the HOH parent, etc.) and soft crediting the DAF (or Family Foundation) and others that need recognition. In addition to this, we will add a gift attribute that lists the "legal donor" so we can pull reports to include legal donor counts in surveys and anywhere else needed.

Does anyone else soft credit their DAF gifts this way? We want to go into this with eyes wide open and hoping for collective wisdom from the community on any pitfalls you foresee. Or if you do this and have great success!

Thank you!

Peter Johnston

Director of Advancement Services

Polytechnic School

pjohnston@polytechnic.org

Hi Peter, I've actually done it both ways over the years.  While I was at a symphony orchestra (fairly small shop raising about $500,000 using RE) I would hard credit the individuals and soft credit the DAFs and family foundations.  We had a very hands on Board and volunteer base and it was so much easier to report on actual numbers for giving by different constituency groups while also sharing that data with the Board and volunteers.  Now I'm in higher ed and I do the opposite with the RE CRM.  Before I arrived, they hadn't consistently been soft and hard crediting the DAFs, so one of the first things I did was go back and cleanup the gift records to reflect the hard credits on the DAFs.  The key is definitely consistency and the Do Not Receipt in the Receipt field on the gift record.  Back at the symphony, we only did acknowledgement letters and I would change the donor to the DAF name and remove the tax language. 

I find it more straightforward to hard credit the DAF by fund name with soft credit only to the recommender(s) named in the source document. We have a specific DAF constituency code, but coding them as Individual also works for constituency reporting. Our Raisers Edge deployment consultant set up our batch and acknowledgement templates to facilitate thank you letters to the recommender. I anticipate more requests to see a fuller context of influence, (e.g., spouses or children who are not listed as recommenders and therefore not soft credited) and will be looking at Power tools for solutions that present linked records as households or return the combined giving history of linked records.