Does anyone know a good way to distinguish between spousal soft credits and foundations? Is there  a way to do it? For example, if I want to know how many donors I have to a certain fund and I select “donor” under tools, query options, gift processing our community foundation will show up once but we may have had 15 gifts from donors through the foundations I would like to count. If I select “recipient” and if there were multiple soft credits it would count each of them when I only want to count the one family gift. Is there an easier way?

Stephanie Stenglein:

Does anyone know a good way to distinguish between spousal soft credits and foundations? Is there  a way to do it? For example, if I want to know how many donors I have to a certain fund and I select “donor” under tools, query options, gift processing our community foundation will show up once but we may have had 15 gifts from donors through the foundations I would like to count. If I select “recipient” and if there were multiple soft credits it would count each of them when I only want to count the one family gift. Is there an easier way?

 

I don't know that you can sort your soft credits through any filter criteria. 

If all the gifts you do not wish to count soft credit receipient for are from individuals you could possibly do 2 queries and merge: one of individuals - no soft credit recipients listed, and one of orgs with soft credit recipients listed.  However if you soft credit any business owners for their company gifts it will include them or if you have 'family foundations' you will still get all soft credits.

You may be able to identify the foundations for which you want to count the individual donors giving through them by an attribute or constit code.  'Family foundations' where you only want gift counted once would need no code or a different attribute or code.  If you can figure out a way to differentiate the two and create two queries using that difference as a criteria then you could merge the queries. 

Just a thought... good luck.

Stephanie - No, there isn't! And it's been one of our biggest complaints to BB...therefore we only use soft credit between Foundations and Individuals, we do not use it for spousal soft crediting.

Does anyone have any suggestions/feedback? 

This is a drag.

I think the problem is when spouse's have separate records and gifts are put on either record instead of just the Head of househld record. I have made this a new policy. You can tell in batch by having HOH field in the const window or opening the record if there is a spouse with a separate record.

The biggest problem i had was with our end of year tax letter. I had to choose soft credit to both, even though the tax letter should only be for hard credit donors. And then i ran an export that showed if a gift had a soft credit receipient and double checked these gifts.  

Laura - I had the same problem.  To ensure that all gifts are entered only on the HoH record,  I created a gift business rule that warns the user when they have chosen a non-HoH record for gift entry.  I also created a rule warning the user when they try to enter a gift in a deceased record.  Having those business rules in place has made my life MUCH easier!

Soft credits are a huge headache.  I do not use them in reporting because of the issue of double counting the gift or some not being counted.  As far as foundations or donor advised funds are concerned; I hard credit the individual and soft credit the fund or foundation.  This is simply for historical purposes and to make the "connection" between the fund/foundation and the individual.  For recognition purposes we always recognize the individual, except for when a donor advised fund specifically requests that you recognize the fund publically instead of the individual.  Usually this is the case with Annual Reports with some donor advised funds. 

Basically I hard credit the record that gets the recognition and soft credit the other.

Michael Manning:

...Basically I hard credit the record that gets the recognition and soft credit the other.

Michael, I will admit I cringed a bit when I read your post expecially the last sentence above.  I can understand your frustration with soft credits and reports, but....ugh.  The hard credit should go to the 'donor' even if it's a foundation/DAF.  Is this a new practice or standard procdure for your org? When someone one else comes in and looks at the donations is it easily clear to them that the individual did not make the donation?  

It will be great some day when BB updates software to accomodate a field for recognition on the gift record.  Would solve many such situtations.   And when they allow for differentiating between foundation/DAF/business soft credits vs spousal soft credits. 

Don't know where else to refer you for standard operating procedures on this except search the forums - there have been numerous posts re soft credit/hard credit donors.  Also may want to search at Blackbaud  User Society, www.blackbus.org.  Good source for answers.

If it works for you...