We're moving to tracking our Donor Advised Funds as separate accounts and I'm wondering how many other organizations do this?
If you do, would you create a separate account for every DAF of Fidelity Investments for example or would you put every gift under one Fidelity record soft credited to each household/individual?
On the same line of thinking in terms of creditee types we're thinking "Foundation", "Corporation", and "DAF" Any other creditee types anyone else uses?
And finally would you ever soft credit more than one individual for the same gift?
Thank you!!!
-Marta
Our setup at City Center was as follows:
We created a separate account for each donor advised fund. The donor advised fund was associated to the donor and had an association of a separate type to the overall organization (ex: Jewish Communal Fund).
We left them all credited to the donor only as "Foundation," the same as gifts from a family foundation.
We never soft-credited more than one individual for the same gift.
Having said that: don't do it! We are finding it extremely problematic to track giving in Version 11 with all of our soft credits. A Fund or Family Foundation can only be affiliated to an individual, so it is tough pulling a list of donations and mashing them into a household or individual depending on the donor's relationship and what is needed.
We also sat down with our Finance office who told us that they preferred to see all of a donor's giving in their account alone and were annoyed by our separate records. We also never needed to see a Fund's giving all by itself. In the future we are only crediting matching gifts and gift memberships.
If seeing what a Fund gives is important to your organization, I would recommend soft-crediting to the fund or family foundation and not the other way around. That way actual giving remains with the donor and no real money hits the other records.
Hi Marta,
I can't speak to the v11 implications as yet, but we've definitely been doing this. We don't have separate accounts for each individual fund. Each gift gets processed through the account of whatever entity actually sent the money, (so we have one account for all money that comes in from Fidelity, one for Schwab, etc.) Our creditee types are more or less exactly what you have.
I don't think there's any situation where we would (deliberately) credit more than one person for the same gift. If you have custom lists or reports based on the soft credited amounts in t_creditee you definitely want to think carefully about what the implications of doing that might be. Generally if I'm pulling a list of donors at X level, I don't want the list to have more people on it than the number of gifts we received. It makes doing quick back-of-the-envelope analysis trickier.
For DAFs we determined it was important to soft-credit and to be able to report the funds from a particular DAF – we do not establish personal funds within the DAF. Instead we have the umbrella group – so Fidelity would be one record as would Jewish Communal Fund. If you were to report to the DAF or others what was posted the soft credit to the advising donor would pretty much detail the personal fund.
For Creditee types we do have a DAF w/Membership and DAF w/no membership -- this allows for assignment of membership though of course if membership all G&S must be declined.
The DAFs use the same fund codes/GL accounts that used otherwise there is no problem in Finance.
Since DAF checks cannot be used to pay off pledges the use of soft credit would also be advised. The temptation to enter a pledge in the donor’s record that will be paid off via DAF check can be pretty tempting if you post everything in the individual.
Whatever you set up keep reporting in mind. If a DAF requests an audit to assure their money is being used as intended andf you do not use soft credit you’ll need another way to determine this. In an earlier thread another site noted they had been audited by a DAF..
DAFs typically do not combine multiple individuals on the same check so I don’t think this will be a concern. However, the crediting for multiples would act much like the posting of a matching gift check that does soft credit many individuals.
From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Marta GarczarczykSent: Tuesday, March 26, 2013 5:55 PMTo: McKinley, LeslieSubject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Best Practices of DAF Tracking and Soft Credits.
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