Foundation & Organization Soft Credits

Overview

Many gifts come in from foundations and matching organizations that may cause confusion with development offices on how to handle data entry and reporting. The two common situations are:

1. Foundation Gifts: Often times schools will face situations where foundations donate money to the school and it can cause confusion on how to handle the gift entry and reporting. Foundations are established to act as a conduit for charitable donations of an individual. A school that receives a gift from a foundation may wish to give credit in its reports to the person(s) responsible for suggesting the gift, rather than, or in addition to, the foundation.
2. Matching Organization Gifts: Often times schools will have organizations (e.g. employers) who will match the gifts given by donors (e.g. employees). A school that receives matching gifts may wish to give credit in its reports to the person(s) responsible for the original gift, rather than, or in addition to, the organization who matched it.

Data Entry

Foundation Gifts

In Veracross, it is important to report the gift as being from the foundation (i.e. the Organization should be set on the Pledge or Donation record). A related foundation member should be given soft credit for gifts made by the foundation with a soft credit type of Organization.

Matching Gifts

In Veracross, it is important to report the matching gift as coming from the Organization with soft credit to the person for whom the gift is a match. To learn more about data entry for matching gifts, see the documentation on Matching Gifts.

Soft Credits

Soft crediting for organizations can get complicated, due to the fact that there are often multiple people that should receive soft credit for the organization’s gift. If that is the case, the total value of the soft credit(s) must equal the value of the gift, or else reports may have incorrect numbers later on. There are a couple of different methods with which to manage multiple soft credits:

Option 1: Override Soft Credit Amounts

This method allows the data entry manager to enter different amounts per soft credit recipient. For example, if the organization gift is $4000 and there are two employees that should receive credit for the gift, the manager can use the Override Amount field on the Soft Credits tab of the gift record to add two $2000 soft credits for each recipient.

Option 2: Household Soft Credit Type

In cases where two spouses should be soft credited for an organization’s gift, there is no need to override the soft credit amount. Instead, use the Soft Credit Type field to assign one spouse the Organization soft credit type. The other spouse should receive the Household soft credit type, because soft credits with the Household soft credit type do not get counted in Giving History totals. This functionality is primarily used to prevent double counting in Giving History totals for a couple’s (personal, not organization) gifts to the school, but works the same way for organization gifts and is a valid option for preventing double counting in reports.

To learn more about the various soft credit types, see the documentation on Donation and Pledge Soft Credits.

Reporting

Organization gifts that have soft credits are included by default in both the organization’s Total Giving as well as the soft credit recipient’s Total Giving. This can result in double counting if a report includes both household and organization giving. To avoid such double counting, it is necessary to specify that such gifts should appear only once, either under the Organization’s Total Giving OR under the soft credit recipient’s Total Giving.

In order to achieve the varying results, the school can use the Soft Credit Options tab on the summary report detail screen to define how they want to count the gifts for the scenarios outlined above. For both Organization (Foundation) gifts and Matching gifts, the school can specify where they want the giving to count:

• Both (soft credit recipient and organization)
• Soft Credit Recipient Only
• Organization Only

By default, summary reports will be set to include the gifts in both the organization and the soft credit recipient giving totals.