Hi all,
I found a few discussions on this several years ago--wanted to see if I could get any updated opinions on crediting and DAFs.
At my last organization, we were hard crediting individual donors (ex: John Smith) with gifts from DAFs and soft crediting the parent organization (i.e. Fidelity Charitable rather than John Smith Donor Advised Fund at Fidelity Charitable). I found this helpful in that it simplifies reports and list pulling so that I don't need to customize to include soft credits or clean something that has pulled both the hard and soft credits for one contribution. I use the Fund Activity Report to find DAF gifts when auditors ask.
At my current organization, the system is the opposite--we hard credit individual DAFs (i.e. John Smith Donor Advised Fund at Fidelity Charitable) rather than the parent organization and soft credit the donor. So far, I have had difficulty in trying to pull info such as donor giving history. My favorite report, the Campaign Giving Comparison, is rendered unusable without a lot of cleaning unless I'm missing something. One suggestion was to instead use a customized output set that includes soft credits, though this would still require you to add up hard and soft credits in excel I believe. Am I missing something easy that would help me? I want to make sure we are compliant but am hopeful there is an easier way to do pull donor annual giving that I haven't yet found.
I see online many organizations do recommend giving the hard credit to the DAF parent. It doesn't really click to me why it would matter who I soft vs. hard credited as long as I could provide the info to auditors. What are your opinions on what works best?
Thanks,
Ashley
This may not be a common approach, but it's my preference. If the parent organization is one we get many DAF's from, like a Community Foundation, we actually setup a payment method for the parent organization. This enables us to hard credit the DAF and soft credit the individual donor if there is one. We rarely need to know the total received from the parent organization, but could still track this through the payment method if needed. Our priority is tracking year over year giving history from the DAF or the donor and thus setup our structure to match that.
Thanks Kyle--so it looks like you're doing a similar thing and creating new records for each individual DAF. The plus of this is that it gives a lot of good detailed info. What I'm having trouble with is simplifying donor giving stats. What reports/list outputs do you use to give a simple picture of a donor's gifts when they gifts are sometimes hard credited to their household account and sometimes to the DAF?