Hello All,

We have a lot of individuals in RE associated with organizations in RE.  For instance,  John Doe and the John Doe Foundation.  We receive gifts from John Doe and also from the Foundation.  Our solicitors would like a way to have an "umbrella" account where all the gifts are stored, in addition to the individual records.  Has anyone done this and can you share pros and cons?  Other suggestions?

Karen

Personally I think this is a horrible idea. If I understand you correctly you would like to create a new constituent record as an 'umbrella' account that has no legal or finacial use to your organization and if mismanaged could cause you to accidentally duplicate gift entry, send multiple solicitations, etc. to these entities as well as causing numbers to be scewed (gift number counts so all percentages would be off). And I won't even go into why would you pay your data entry personnel to do 'faux' entry - bad use of resources!

My immediate thought is are you using Soft Credits? It seems to me if you are using soft credits appropriately - these accounts would already be combined for reporting to solicitors.

Are you using soft credits?  This should provide the gift history you need. 

While I wouldn't personally create 'umbrella' records, I do wish the relationship link had more functions.  Would love to be able to automatically have both individual and the company/foundation/firm assigned together when solicitors to choose their prospect assignments.  I can dream....

You can set it up, using soft credits, so the individual record is the "umbrella".  In the foundation record, under Relationships, the contact for the linked individual should be marked to "Automatically soft credit this individual for gifts" (General 2 tab).

This is pretty routine for us because we have a lot of individuals with family foundations.  The foundation sends us checks under their name and the individual sends us personal checks.  The individual's personal checks are usually for special events that have goods and services.  Also for honor/memorial gifts.  We do not soft credit the foundation for personal checks.

I don't like the idea of doing this...for all the reasons you stated.  We do use soft credits.  In order for that to work, all personal gifts would have to be soft-credited to the foundation so that we could get a giving "grand total" for the entity of donor and foundation.  Thanks very much for your input!