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  • 1.  Soft Credit Event Participants

    Posted 02-27-2023 09:00 AM

    We are being asked to soft credit event registrants. To be clear, the person who pays for the event registration receives the hard credit. This person then lists people that will be a part of their team (these people are not paying just participating) and we are being asked to soft credit those people. I am trying to find anything that addresses this for best practices but have not been able to find anything that speaks to event participation. Does anyone know where I can find best practices for this or have suggestions as to how we should handle?



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    Stacy Connor
    Director, Advancement Services
    The University of Tulsa
    stacy-connor@utulsa.edu
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  • 2.  RE: Soft Credit Event Participants

    Posted 02-27-2023 09:23 AM

    Stacy,

     

    What is the purpose of soft crediting event participants?  Is it to be able to query on event participants?  Do you actually have any charitable donation component of your event registration fees? 

     

    In our case (we us RE, RE NXT, and OLX), we utilize the integrated registration capabilities and tag the participants in this way, which allows us to query on event participants without actually entering any soft credits.

     

    Michael

     

    signature_3148912184

     

    Michael S. Dotson, PhD, bCRE-Pro (he/him/his)

    Senior Director of Information and Data Services

    Philanthropy & Alumni Engagement

    AUGUSTA UNIVERSITY

    1120 15th Street AD-1119

    Augusta, GA 30912

     

    t: 706-721-0063

    augusta.edu    augustahealth.org

     

    Help make our data even better – send updates to IDS@augusta.edu.

     

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  • 3.  RE: Soft Credit Event Participants

    Posted 02-27-2023 09:26 AM

    We do have a donation portion for this. They are asking for the non paying registrants to be counted as donors.



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    Stacy Connor
    Director, Advancement Services
    The University of Tulsa
    stacy-connor@utulsa.edu
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Soft Credit Event Participants

    Posted 02-27-2023 09:45 AM

    Update, I have found something on the CASE site to support my opinion:

    The individual sponsors of the collecting donor should not be counted as donors for the purposes of this survey. Some platforms provide the sponsor with the opportunity to opt-in to hearing more from the charity. For donors who opt-in, you may choose to import their details and create entity records for them in order to steward them for future possible dona-tions. As such you may wish to give them soft credit for their donation(s), though only the collecting donor can be counted as a donor in donor numbers for CASE AMAtlasSM purposes.



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    Stacy Connor
    Director, Advancement Services
    The University of Tulsa
    stacy-connor@utulsa.edu
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Soft Credit Event Participants

    Posted 02-27-2023 04:25 PM
    This is a data governance/data mastering issue. 

    A soft credit has to mean something. Typically, it means that the person participated meaningfully in soliciting the gift, or was, in practice, the decision-maker for giving the gift but was not the legal owner of the funds (eg DAF advisor).

    Soft-crediting event participants breaks that definition. As soon as you do it, it makes every soft credit record in your database less meaningful, because you can't tell if they were involved in driving a gift, or whether someone paid for them to attend an event. 


    Isaac Shalev
    Data Strategy Expert
    (917) 859-0151
    isaac@sage70.com

    Autocorrect was used in composting this email, please excuse any typos




    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Soft Credit Event Participants

    Posted 02-27-2023 05:05 PM

    It seems to me that there might be two different scenarios here:

     

    1. Lead donor gets together a bunch of people for their team, each of whom gives the lead donor their share of the registration fee.  The lead donor then signs up the team and submits the payment that they have collected.
    2. Lead donor decides to participate and invites a bunch of people to be part of their team, but the lead donor personally pays the registration fee.

     

    In terms of hard credit/receipting, the two scenarios are the same, because the legal donor is the lead donor, who was in possession of the cash that you received.

     

    However, with respect to soft credit, it seems to me that, if you can determine that the first scenario is what happened, I could make a defensible case that the individual team members could be soft-credited for their portion of the team registration gift.  That wouldn't qualify them as donors for CASE-/U.S. News-standard reporting, but it does seem to reflect their actual participation.

     

    In the second scenario, I would not soft-credit the team members, nor in any case would I soft-credit individual team members for team's entire registration fee.

     

    My US$0.02 worth; the usual disclaimers apply.

     

    Good luck!

     

    Alan

     

    Alan S. Hejnal    (he/him/his)

    Data Quality Manager

     

     




    Original Message


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