I sent an appeal to anyone who hadn't given to anything in the last last 10 years, using head of household processing.

We received a check from the wife (non-head-of-household) and saw that she DID have gifts on her record from the past 10 years. Since the gifts were given before she and her husband were married, her husband was not soft credited. After some investigating, and many vlookups in excel, we foudn that this was the case for 43 out of the 27,000 people we mailed to. Not exactly a majority, but still something to be addressed.

We are considering retroactively soft crediting all spouse gifts, even from before marriage (all people in our database are constituents). Does anyone else do this? Pros and Cons?

 Thanks so much!

-Lindsay

my 2 cents...

43 out of 27,000 - that's a tenth of a percent ( 0.15%) - to me that's really minor.  

We don't do that type of soft crediting and I can't see doing it in the future.  Do you have a criteria/guideline for when to soft credit gifts?

The non-donating spouse may or may not have had a 'real' relationship with the organization when the donating spouse gave.  If you do a lot of reporting on donor history type things, you may end up with some inaccurate reports.   In today's culture you may also end up with a donating spouse giving and a soft credit for the same gift to a former spouse, spouse, and even a 'future spouse 5 years down the road.'   If the non-donating spouse has not donated for 10 years, especially with a spouse who now supports you, cultivating a deeper relationship with them is where I would put my time and effort.

As they were not married, the non-donating spouse really didn't have any interest/involvement/input on how the donating spouse gave the money 2,4,7, or 10 years ago.  For us, that is more of a criteria for soft crediting.

Good luck.

Thank you for your input JoAnn. It does start to get really messy when talking about applying soft credits like mad. But I can't see any other way to get around our problem. I don't want to treat a couple like an acquisition when the wife was giving all along before marriage. In our situation, usually the non-donating spouse does have a relationship with our organization. We're a small private university, so many of our donors are alumni, and most marriages captured in our database are marriages to other alumni. This might need to be something we decide to do on a case by case basis.

Hi Lindsay,

 We are a school also and have run into the same issue. Mostly when running lifetime giving histories against donor categories. "Why is Mary in the Grand PoohBah level and George in the Turtle level!!??? What's wrong with this report???!!! What's wrong with the data???!! "Makes for craziness until someone remembers to look at the individual giving histories.

We don't soft credit for giving that occurred when they weren't married but it seems reasonable to me that if you have an alum married to alum you just might want to do that. Currently I know of 2 couples off the top of my head who fall into that category. One being our Institutional Advancement VP and his wife.  I don't think I would do it across the board for non alum, just for alum.

 Just my 2 cents.

laura

Thank you! We've decided to do this on a case by case basis.