Soft Credit reporting in Intelligence

[rkeeven]

Hello, Our organization would like to start recording donations that come in from Donor Advised Funds (DAF) under the DAF with a soft credit to the supporter. This is best practice to help ensure that we don’t distribute a receipt to a donor with a donation which they did not give to us directly. The foundation or account with the DAF will supply the receipt, for example, Fidelity Charitable or St. Louis Community Foundation. Just to provide that background info.

So, when we want to pull a report of donors who gave $1,000+ in a year, we’d ideally like to option for it to take into account the soft credits as well. This is also why it would be helpful to have a soft credit column option on the reports so we can best know who has given how much. Funraise’s description of soft credits seems to be more about who inspired a gift, but I’ve always known of soft credits more for who a donation is from when they gave through a third-party. A little more info if it’s helpful.

Uses for Soft Credits
Best Practices for DAF

It would be helpful to pull reports with notes so if a donation has a note attached, we can see it without going into each individual account. I also noticed that when entering a check or donation on the backend, there isn’t the option to dedicate the donation in honor or memory of someone. I was doing this today and put that info as a transaction note instead. It’d be great to have the option to add a dedication on the back end.

In my eyes and from my experience in Development, this is an urgent need for FR. Honestly, with how much extra we are paying for Intelligence on top of FR, I am bewildered that this reporting for soft credits isn’t included. I don’t say that in a complaining way, but that it’s honestly surprising and disappointing that something like this isn’t included.

Thank you.

[tony]

Hi @rkeeven, thanks for your feedback.

Organizations use soft credits for multiple purposes, including DAF, spouses, and peer-to-peer fundraising donations - and you’re right, the mixing of these concepts may make it less concrete for a specific case. Your feedback is helpful.

As an example, in the peer-to-peer case, a fundraiser is soft-credited with each donation to their fundraising page because they are “responsible” for these donations. In this case, the donor receives the receipt, but the fundraiser does not. This is the most common use case for soft credits for organizations using Funraise.

In the case of a DAF, our recommendation is to create the donation in the name of the DAF, because the DAF is actually the “donor”. It sounds like this is the strategy you’re using already. You would then soft-credit the human supporter who was “responsible” for this DAF donation. In that way, the DAF would receive the receipt and the human supporter would be credited in the backend. You’re right that improved reporting on soft credits would make this easier to manage in reports.

Our product team will take a look at the three improvements you’ve suggested (adding both soft credits and transaction notes to our fundraising intelligence reports and adding the ability to add a dedication when entering an offline donation). These improvements would go a long way for many orgs.

Thank you for the feedback

[rkeeven]

Tony, thank you for your quick response and your request to improve reporting. It would be very hellpful since right now there is no way on a report to see how much a donor has given personally and through a DAF (soft credit).

Have a great day!