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.