I am looking for information from other non-profits about how you deal with money from a fundraiser routed through the person who held the event. We have used pledges and pay-cash to allocate the gifts to the appropriate person but I can't receipt these - giving a receipt to the person who wrote the cheque wouldn't be ethical since they didn't donate their money but wrote a cheque for money received at the event.
United way, oxfam, world vision should all have dealt with this kind of thing regularly, can somebody tell me how you have worked around this since the raiser's edge won't receipt pledges?

I' not sure I'm understanding your reference to United Way in this but if you are trying to say that an individual volunteer forwarding money to you on behalf of others is the same as someone donating to United Way and designating it to your org, it is not. United Way is a 501 c 3 non profit and they can accept gift and issue recipts to donors for them. They then can make gifts to your organization and are the legal donors of those gifts designated by individuals. An individual volunteer is not a 501 c 3 so they should be asking the donors to write checks to you directly to avoid this problem. If they collected a certain amount of money there is no way to prove that they in turn actually gave you 100% of that money unless the gifts are made out to you. Did you get a list of the donors and how much they gave? I also think that if they gave the money to an individual it is not a gift, but that is just a hunch and I could be wrong. I am not certain on the legalities of this but you should definitely ask this on the listserv at fundsvcs.org. There are professionals on there who can point you to the legal responsibilities you have in this situation and who the legal donor is for receipting. They can not provide true legal advice, you would need to seek an attorney for that but they can get you to the right resources and give non-legal advice (I'm sure they can answer this) To join FundSvcs - THE Advancement Services listserv - follow this link: http://listserv.fundsvcs.org/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=fundsvcs&A=1  *** I can spell, I just can't type. Where is spell check? Melissa S. Graves Manager, Development Database & Direct Mail Planned Parenthood of Connecticut [Email Removed] 203-752-2804

Thanks for your response but I do believe you misunderstood me. Charities receive gifts from someone who held an event, one cheque for many donations accompanied with the people who gave's info for them to receive a tax receipt. I have checked the legality - the person who sent in the $ was paying for other people's donations and they shouldn't get the charitable receipt. I am asking about how to receipt pledges within Raiser's Edge b/c it wont receipt anything other than cash gifts, we can't enter the gifts twice and need to reflect the cheque received. HOW DO YOU AS A CHARITY RECEIPT PEOPLE WHO GIVE THROUGH ANOTHER PERSON? Thanks for any help you can offer about policies and procedures for getting around this gap in funcitonality.

Actually, it is my understanding that the check writer is the legal donor and gets the hard credit for the money. And that is who the IRS recognizes as the legal donor, no matter if they provide a list of names and say that those people gave some of the money. As Melissa stated, this has been discussed many times on the FundSvcs list. So I would give the check writer the hard credit and soft credit the people on list. And while a thank you may be in order, they should not receive credit for tax purposes. And we don't use receipts here, only letters which serve as receipts and you can generate letters for soft credits through Mail. I DO understand that you said you have already checked the legalities of this but I just wanted to put in my two cents anyway. Denise Stengl School Sisters of St. Francis Milwaukee, WI [Email Removed] Don't forget to check out the RE Users Forum at: http://www.reusers.server-planet.com/forum.php

I'm not sure I understand your use of pledge payments in this regard but we receipt pledge payments. We use the donor acknowledgement letter to send a letter thanking them for their payment with a receipt at the bottom giving pledge amount, payment amount and current balance on the pledge and a statement saying whether or not benefits were received in exchange for the payment. I don't use the receipts in RE to do this so I can't answer why you aren't able to receipt anything but cash. Do you receipt for pledges? Can't you just send them the receipt for the pledge? - which I am assuming is on their individual record. If I were doing this and I knew their names and addresses and how much of the gift was theirs I would just put a cash gift on each of their records for the portion they gave and send them a receipt (the host would be in this category assuming they told you how much of the check was from them). I would put the unknown peoples total amount in one gift on a record designated for unknown donors. The sum of these gifts should be the total amount in the check. I wouldn't deal with a pledge at all. This is in fact how we do this for companies who have employee giving programs with matches where the check comes with the employees $ and the companies match in one check. It is one check but It can be from 2 - 50+ gifts. If 49 employees contributed and the company matched some or all of those gifts - those are all 50 individual gifts to be recorded as cash on their records. There would not be one gift totaling the amount of the check anywhere in our system. *** I can spell, I just can't type. Where is spell check? Melissa S. Graves Manager, Development Database & Direct Mail Planned Parenthood of Connecticut [Email Removed] 203-752-2804

In the case of employee giving it is not the check writer who is the donor and I think that if you look into this you will find that this may also be the case in this situation. While generally this can hold true it is not a hard and fast rule. You can check fundsvcs on this as well. *** I can spell, I just can't type. Where is spell check? Melissa S. Graves Manager, Development Database & Direct Mail Planned Parenthood of Connecticut [Email Removed] 203-752-2804

I was not speaking to employee giving. I must of missed that, I was responding specficially to her question of: HOW DO YOU AS A CHARITY RECEIPT PEOPLE WHO GIVE THROUGH ANOTHER PERSON? So if it is a different situation, feel free to ignore me, I won't take it personally. :) Denise Stengl School Sisters of St. Francis Milwaukee, WI [Email Removed] Don't forget to check out the RE Users Forum at: http://www.reusers.server-planet.com/forum.php

Tara - We have your exact situation. We have two different families who hold events to benefit us, and in both cases they occasionally get checks made out to them or they receive cash. In those cases, they either countersign the check or deposit it and write us one consolidated check. We enter the donations on the records of the people who originally gave the money and add a note in the reference field saying something like "on check 123 of John Smith." Although we have not yet done it, we are considering using a gift subtype to capture this info in a way that will be easy to pull on. Trish Morgan Associate Director Pathways Hospice Foundation [Email Removed]

Hi Tara and others Tara, I see from your info that you're from Ottawa. Canadian and US tax receipting procedures are a bit different. Thanks, Melissa and Denise for all the references, but unfortunately, they don't apply to Canadian tax receipting. Tara, Check Canada Revenue Agency's site. Look under Charities, Find your Topic. Look for something like "Name on Official Donation Receipt". It explains it quite well. You can issue an official tax receipt, but you would use gift, not pledge, since if you are giving a receipt, it has to be a true donation. You have to report all donations which are issued receipts on your charitable IT return,so you are not receipting pledges. You must have a list of the "true donors" as mentioned in the CRA literature. On the gift record of the true donor, you can reference who wrote the cheque - I would set up all these particular donors with a note to explain this. Hope this helps. If you need more info feel free to contact me. [Email Removed]

Good call Anne Marie. I (and I'm guessing most people) do not check peoples Info before replying . . . so this is another good reason, why people should include some type of signature with their posts, with at the very least an org name and location. It gives us more information on which to format our replies. Denise Stengl School Sisters of St. Francis Milwaukee, WI [Email Removed] Don't forget to check out the RE Users Forum at: http://www.reusers.server-planet.com/forum.php  --- Edited at 9/22/2006 9:54:53 AM by Denise Stengl

Hi Denise Yes, I agree when asking about a tax receipting/government regulations/reporting, we should mention what country we're referring to. I just had a feeling that this might be a "Canadian" question because in Canada, official tax receipts have to be issued in order for a donor to claim credit on income tax, no matter the amount. An acknowledgement letter just won't cut it, unfortunately; neither will a cancelled cheque (check) or credit card statement/receipt. So, anyways at least this brings forth the differences in the procedures and regulations - which I think we can all benefit from. [Email Removed]