Hi All,
We will be sending letters to our donors with a list of their 2017 donations for tax purposes. Because some donors write checks as well as give through a Donor Advised Fund (DAF), the summary letters are ending up being very complicated as we are not allowed to provide tax receipts for DAFs. Instead of a simple merged list of donations in a letter, we are having to research each donation to see if it was made through a DAF and make sure to remove the DAF gifts. Does anyone else have an easier method such as a Tax Statement that would allow us to list every donation in the calendar year, including those made through a DAF?
Thanks for your help!
Miki
The Tech Museum of Innovation
Good morning Miki,
Oh man, Donor Advised Funds; always a treat at tax letter time!
Some members of our consortium use an Annual Giving Summary report, and I've actually just sent the code along to Tessitura for them to list in their shared reports repository for anyone interested in making use of it.
That said, a lot of the work with regard to DAFs comes down to how the data got entered in the first place.
If the contributions get entered on a record for the DAF, then obviously it simplifies your year-end reporting quite a bit because then you're just soft crediting the individual donor but the gift information lives with the DAF and doesn't pull on the individual's letter.
If the contributions are entered to the individual with a soft credit to the DAF, then it absolutely gets more complex with regard to tracking down what gifts an individual should actually get tax notice for.
What method are you all using currently (or is it maybe a third, hybrid method)?
Thank you,
Brian