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
Regardless of how you set up the accounts the proper way to record money from a third party is just to know - did THEY provide the donor the tax receipt. If they DID, the Org gets the hard (legal) credit and the donor gets soft credit. If the Org/Fndtn that sent the money does NOT provide the legal tax receipt, then the donor gets the hard credit. Does that make sense?
I've considered setting up individual accounts so reports like the Fund Activity would show the donor name also but it just makes me feel messy. So my CFO just knows that when she sees "Schwab" in the Board Giving report that its really "Joe P." We're a small org. A larger org might need to separate them - one record for "Schwab - Joe P" and so on. Ugh!