Deceased Spouse Gift Merging

Rebekah Stapp

When a husband passes away, it is our current practice to merge all gifts from his record to the living spouse record to maintain the giving history on the new head of household record. We have not previously used soft credits at our organization; however, we are looking into it. My question is, for all intents and purposes, would the soft credit gift entry on the spouse record be sufficient to take the place of merging the original cash gift entries? This would save us a lot of time in the merging process; however, I want to make sure we are not overlooking any aspects of what this would affect. I am curious how others handle existing gift records when the head of household passes away?

JoAnn Strommen

We have always soft credited spouses.  


Yes, it would be more efficient, IMO.


I suppose, it could affect reports if you do not include crediting SC to the SC recipient. You just need to adjust criteria. If you're not using SC in any other way you wouldn't have issues that some have with SC of organization gifts.

Rebekah Stapp

Thank you for your response! I am glad to know this has worked for you in the past.


Do you do any type of gift merging at all when a spouse passes away?

JoAnn Strommen

I don't do any gift merging. Our business rule settings are to create (surviving) spouse record if they do not already have their own. Auto function is to SC gifts. 


If both have had their own record I usually check to see that gifts are SC.

Christine Cooke

Yes sufficient most definitely.  And keeps the history of the couple in place while still telling the whole story.

Dariel Dixon

Christine Cooke bCREPro:

Yes sufficient most definitely.  And keeps the history of the couple in place while still telling the whole story.

I think keeping the history is important, however I think it's more important to keep accuracy.  I think there's times when the affinity lived more with the deceased than the surviving spouse.  I don't know if it is necessary to move gift history over to a surviving spouse, especially since you can just just soft credit recognition for those gifts when they were married.