My organization works with philanthropic advisors. Gifts may be from different individuals but through the same advisor. Do others have this situation? How would you recommend coding accordingly to track these anonymous donors?

Thanks for your help.

We have the same situation in my organization and I was actually looking for the same information. The way it has been done here (I'm pretty new)is that the donor advised fund is credited as the donor and the "advisee" is soft-credited. the problem I'm encountering is that when reports are run, my donor (not the fund) does not come up unless I include all those soft credited. However, we also soft-credit spouses so showing soft credits too just creates more confusion. I'd really appreciate any info. you're able to find out about this. Thanks!

Fran, you are doing this as it should be done. According to IRS regulations, the hard credit must go to the donor-advised fund (DAF), since the constituent receives tax credit from the DAF at the time the money is sent to the DAF. I see this as a mushrooming problem, as more and more people discover the benefits of usinf DAF's. Blackbaud needs to address this in their soft credit programming. At the present time there does not seem to be an easy way to properly credit the gift and still display the constituent name in donor lists. I have seen one suggestion, which may be the best way for now. I have not tried this, but does have potential. The suggestion is to set up a separate record for each fund, such as the John and Mary Doe Fund at DAFName. The hard credit could go there, with sift credit to John and Mary Doe, and use an attribute called Published Name for listing the donor name as you want it. Jo Ward Neuhaus Education Center (713) 664-7676 ext. 233 [Email Removed]

Fran, You are absolutely right about the HUGE probelm with RE treating org soft credits the same as spousal soft credits. When you choose SC to recipient you get the donor of a DAF gift but you also get the spouse and not the donor. It is really frustrating but I know I have filed it as a suggestion before. EVERYONE should create a case to get added to the suggestion and tell BB that they absolutely must fix this. *** my spelling is fine, it's my typing that stinks. Where is spell check? Melissa S. Graves Manager, Development Database & Direct Mail Planned Parenthood of Connecticut [Email Removed] 203-752-2804

And I thought I was missing something because I'm new to RE! Thank you both for your responses. I need to think more about the idea of creating a new record for each s/c donor-advised fund. I was also trying to figure out the downside (in addition to the time it would take to revise current records) to creating just one record per family so that spouses don't have their own record. This would help with the soft-credit issue in reports. Any thoughts are appreciated. Fran Kantor Director of Annual Giving The Rashi School Brookline MA [Email Removed]

Thank you for all of your responses. That helps a lot. I'm still curious, however, about how to document gifts when I know that they are coming from different donors through the same philanthropic advisory group but it's very anonymous. Any suggestions? Michele Macon Development Officer Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

Michele- When we receive a gift from a donor advised fund it is accompanied by a letter from the fund that provides information as to who "advised" making the contribution to us as well as any other specific information about the gift, e.g. if it's for a restricted purpose and such. As far as anonymity goes, those donors who wish to remain anonymous let us know this request outside of the fund communication. I'm not sure if this answers your question - let me know if your experience is different. Fran Kantor Director of Annual Giving The Rashi School Brookline MA [Email Removed]

One of the benefits of a DAF is the option of giving anonymously. We have not had anyone choose this option, but we did have one that had instructions in the paperwork accompanying the DAF gift that we could thank the donors, but they were NOT to be solicited. We marked their record accordingly. If you do receive an anonymous gift from a DAF, then I suppose you could create an Anonymous Fund at DAFName record, or create a record for teh DAF and use it to record all anonymous gifts through that fund. Jo Ward Neuhaus Education Center (713) 664-7676 ext. 233 [Email Removed]

We have separate org records for each fund and link them together using the parent corp field and a relationship between the DAF and the Company (Fidelity, Hartford Foundation, etc.) as well as a relationsip between the DAF and the donor(s) if known.

We set up an automatic soft credit between the fund and the donor whenever we possibly can. Occasionally more than one family member can advise from that fund and then we have to manually soft credit. Occasionally we have gifts from DAFs like "Anonymous Fund #40" for which we have a separate DAF record with that name but we soft credit no one because we do not have the donor's name.

If you are not getting from the philanthropic advisor an official name of the fund or the donor (which happens sometimes) and it just says a"n anonymous donor advised a gift from Fidelity..." then you need to decide if you can put all those gifts into one record called "Unknown DAF at Fidelity" or if you need some other system.

(I use unknown instead of Anonymous to differentiate it from a known donor who just wants us to keep their gifts anonymous and those for which we received no name at all. I have an Unknown Donors Record, an Unknown DAF Record, etc.)

I hope this helps. *** my spelling is fine, it's my typing that stinks. Where is spell check?

Melissa S. Graves
Manager, Development Database & Direct Mail
Planned Parenthood of Connecticut
[Email Removed]
203-752-2804

Like Melissa, we also set up a constituent record for each fund for all the reasons she mentioned. Another benefit of doing it this way is that the Community Funds we have locally instruct us how to recognize each gift. Which is usually something like: The Joseph and Helen Rothberg Family Fund within the Community Foundation of Greater Sun City Center. We used to list every DAF gift in the Community Foundation so when it came time to pull the list for our newsletter it would have to be done manually. I hate doing things manually...it leads to carpal tunnel syndrome! Michael J. Sherman Donor Services Manager The Boys & Girls Clubs of Tampa Bay 1307 N. MacDill Avenue Tampa, FL 33607 813.769-7533 [Email Removed]