FundSvcs Community

Hello All,

I think I know the answer to this, but I'll ask anyway. Can I hard credit "The XYZ fund at the DE Community Foundation," or do I have to hard credit the Community Foundation and soft credit The XYZ Fund? The name on the check is DE Community Foundation.

Thanks,

Bridget

I would disagree with any blanket statement that managing separate records for DAFs at a sponsoring organization isn't useful.  It may well vary based on the specific circumstances of your organization, and I have found it very useful for organizing this information. 

We currently have almost a thousand DAFs linked to one sponsoring organization, with an order of magnitude more grants.  Having the intermediate association with the specific DAF has proved helpful in understanding this information.  Many of the DAFs are consistently associated with giving of one or two people, but other DAFs include giving from a shifting alignment of donors, and the DAF entities help in understanding that activity.  If a donor lets us know informally that they're initiating a DAF grant, having the links to person to DAF help us keep an eye out for that distribution.  Knowing that a donor has given through multiple DAFs, possibly at multiple sponsoring organizations, is a useful data point.  Having the DAF name can help personalize donor acknowledgments (and perhaps whether that is "irrelevant" is open to discussion?).  And so on.

There is overhead in managing this data, but it's quite modest, in my experience, and the data has proved useful.  

We consistently hard-credit the sponsoring organization, so we have not found that having the additional DAF soft-credit complicates identifying the correct legal donor in any receipting or reporting.

If you don't find it useful to manage information on DAFs, by all means, don't.  If you do find it useful to manage that information, that's perfectly reasonable, whatever else you may hear.

My US$0.02 worth; the usual disclaimers apply.

Good luck!