Stuff You Need to Know about Soft Credits and Matching Gifts

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Soft credits and matching gifts are a great way in Raiser's Edge to track both the actual donor of a gift, but also any other constituents who should receive credit for it. This includes Soft Credits, which show that a different constituent (such as a spouse) also deserves credit for a given gift, and Matching Gifts, which are gifts made by an organization in response to another gift. 

To help make the most of these great tools, we've shared a few of our favorite resources in this month's Stuff You Need to Know section. Got a handy tip of your own? Please join us in the Need to Know Forum Contest to share your wisdom and help your fellow RE users become masters. We'll also be hosting a Live Chat later this month with further tips, demos, and a live Q & A with me and a special guest co-host!

As a bonus to kick off the Need to Know resources, let's talk about Export. In any gift field of an export, you have the option to choose how to credit matching gifts and soft credits:
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However, if you're trying to see a constituent's total in actual gifts and soft credits separately, this would need a separate field with different criteria. In this video, I show how to export my constituents' total giving for last year in hard credits, soft credits, and matching gifts separately. That way, for each constituent, I know how much they actually gave, but also how much they should be credited for through soft credits and matching gifts. 

Thanks for reading, and happy fundraising!
News Raiser's Edge® Blog 11/08/2016 12:15pm EST

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7 Comments
Thank you for the reminder.
Thank you, David. Sorry I wasn't able to attend the Live Chat. I'll change the export/query and see what happens.
Hi Debbie!

Good question! There isn't an option you can select on the gift or constituent itself to make RE ALWAYS display the soft credit. It would need to be an option chosen in each export/report/query separately. In the case of a Crystal Report, you'd want to change the option in the export, which would then change which value shows up in the Crystal Report.

I'd also encourage you to join me for our Live Chat tomorrow afternoon as well: https://community.blackbaud.com/events/item/2/1193. I'll be going over a few tips and tricks, and then opening things up for a live question and answer session. :)
I have a custom report for our parish appeal. Some donors give through their parish, but the gift is made to our organization so the donor gets the credit and the parish receives a soft credit. I would like the soft credit to show up on the custom report. Is there a way to mark it so it will do that? Do I need to make changes to the export or the crystal report on which the custom report is based?
Thank you so much, David!
That's a great question! The soft credit options only affect those gifts that HAVE soft credits. So it will include hard credit totals if that gift doesn't have a soft credit.

If you want the total of a constituent's soft credits ONLY, you can include a query of gifts that are soft credited in the summary field. In the following video, I've shown how you can add this query to the export field from within the export: http://screencast.com/t/ibH4ySLvi2r9.

Knowledgebase article 37895 covers this as well. :)
I wonder if I am missing something: when I perform this export, the "soft credits" summary includes gifts that are hard-credited to the donor (with no soft credits elsewhere). At least, when I review the data, that is what I see. Is there a way to get only the soft credits?

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