Hello,
I'm interested in hearing your ideas about how to book family foundation donations. We've been entering them in the foundation record with a soft credit to the individual. Recently, I've heard from our sr. management team that the family foundation money belongs to the individual and they want it counted as part of their hard gifts. So I've considered entering the donations in the individual record with a soft credit to he foundation record. But this will probably create a problem with Finance. I also considered creating a special appeal called Individual designated fund so we can find them on lists and reports and manually add them to the hard gifts. The other option is to use the credit type in reports to find them.
How do you all handle these?
Thanks very much!
Ida
Hi Ida,
We recently began soft crediting family foundation gifts again. There was a period before I arrived where they had stopped soft crediting and everything was hard credited to the individual's account. This led to some interesting situations when creating tax letters, sharing giving history with the donor, and tracking donors' giving. Now our business practice is to always book gifts to the account that paid, and soft credited to the individual. In this case, we soft credit with a Family Foundation creditee type. We also have a family foundation constituent type, which makes it easy to pull these out in lists and reports.
The crediting creates the biggest issue for us with benefits and recognition since both the hard and soft credits almost always count toward the individual's giving. We edit program names manually and gift memberships are helpful for tracking benefits on the right account. For lists and reporting, I sometimes have to pull a separate list of gifts with the Family Foundation creditee type and combine gifts.
HI Juliane,
Creating a family foundation constituent type is a good idea in addition to the creditee type. Thanks for your help!