Gifts on our system are entered with a soft credit to the spouse. Soft credit is determined by who signed the check so a couple has soft credits both ways. I am trying to run the Donor levels report but I cannot get it to produce one entry for a couple. A Couple will show up in two level areas which increases the their total giving. I have tried the various options on the Soft Credit to options and they just dont seem to work like I need. Does anyone have suggestions?

Cry

Scream

Freak Out

These have been my approaches in the past.

Spousal soft credits is a huge problem in RE and there is no way I have found to fix this. Where I was previously the couples giving was maintained on one record except in very few exceptions. This eliminated much of the cleanup problems with such a list.

I am now in a new position and they do the same thing here with hard credit the check signer (even if a joint account) and it is a reporting nightmare. We have to run such donor lists with SC to at least recipient if not both because of donor advised funds, etc. As long as spousal soft credits are reported on exactly as fundation (or other third party) soft credits are then we will all continue to have this problem.

Sometimes you can use Head Of Household processing to help - depending on where (if) you have the couple salutation and which report you use.

Most of the time we have to catch them by hand and fix them. Melissa S. Graves
Director of Development Services
The Village for Families and Children
mgraves (at) villageforchildren.org
www.villageforchildren.org

GET ON THE BUS! Check out what the Blackbaud User Society is talking about today at www.blackbus.org!

Also do not forget to search the archives for older posts - we have discussed this before. Melissa S. Graves Director of Development Services The Village for Families and Children mgraves (at) villageforchildren.org www.villageforchildren.org GET ON THE BUS! Check out what the Blackbaud User Society is talking about today at www.blackbus.org!

Since we now take many online donations and registrations to our website, we have more married couples who are both constituents because they now have personal relationships with us through our website. The method I use for a quick result is to make sure that each person has the full married name as the primary addressee (i.e. Mr. and Mrs. David Jones) This is our norm anyway. Then I choose the primary addressee as the name displayed in the Gift and Detail report. The report will list the summed gifts separately; however, they will be listed next to each other with the same name. If I want more than that, I use Crystal to create custom reports. I think it is a fact of life that as we use the web more, we have to respect the individuality of constituents. It is a dilemma in reporting. When we get checks, we use the head of household donor normally understanding that the check came from the household and either person signs unless there is only one person's name on the check. Then he/she gets the gift. Hope this helps from a different perspective. Nora Isaac Manager, Information Technology The ALS Association, Greater Phila. Chapter www.alsphiladelphia.org [Email Removed] [i]--- Edited at 8/2/2007 8:56:26 AM by Nora Isaac[/i]

We've also had problems with this. We use the Donor Category Report to produce the list for our annual report, but I also create an Export for the project and use Export's Summary field to add up the donations for the specified time period. I enable the "soft credits to both" checkbox, and output Head of Household only, and then I get more accurate totals regardless of which spouse is selected. Afterward, we use the exported list to doublecheck for accuracy within the Donor Category Report. This catches individuals who have been soft credited through a donor advised fund to make sure they're in the correct category. This approach is not foolproof because of other non-spouse soft credits (from sole proprietorships, for example), but it helps.

I like Melissa's suggestions of Cry, Scream and Freak Out. We could also add Crawl Under Desk and Assume Fetal Position ;-)

Brenda Haight
Boise State University