Benevity and other third party entities

Tenika Thompson

We receive money from Benevity on a monthly basis. We hard credit Benevity and then soft credit the actual donors. We also have a donor recognition called Champions of Hope for donors who give $1K+. We consider anyone who gives whether it is thru Benevity or United Way for instance a Champion of Hope donor theoreticall but have been struggling with how best to manage them. With that said we would like to better manage these types of donors. For instance a donor just reached out to us saying he gives $39 per pay check thru Benevity and would like to be a Champion of Hope donor. And that is great and I would like to know how other organizations manage the recognition for these donors. My first thought is to create an attribute/custom field called Champions of Hope or create a constituent code. But that will require a lot of maintenance and I don't think it's very efficient. Queries - work but again this is a cumulative amount of $1K+ and this donor as well as many others depending on how many gifts we have recorded would not be $1K yet. How would you do it? 

Crystal Bruce

Discussion moved to RENXT Community Forums. Thanks!

Anna Theodore

Subbed to this thread because we also receive a non-negligible amount of donations through Benevity. Like your organisation, we've been hard crediting Benevity and soft crediting donors, but this fails to capture people as recurring donors if they regularly donate through their payroll deductions


Would love to hear other people's thoughts on capturing these donations more rigorously. Unfortunately, I don't have any suggestions yet.

Shauna Kipper

We used to process these gifts that way as well and I was running into similar problems. Since we do not have to issue a receipt or recognize the third party organization in any way, I now hard credit the donor and soft credit the third party. I also indicate it on the gift (either through an Appeal Package, attribute, gift subtype, gift code etc.) that it came from a third party so I can collect those gifts together. I recently changed to this method and it seems to be working a bit better....

Laura Easterly

We also hard credit the donor with the gift rather than crediting Benevity.  It makes things more complicated on the entry side, especially since we have to do some extra math to fairly distribute the fees across all donations, but that way we can see who actually gave the gift.  


As for the Champions of Hope program you mention, we also have a program that is based on $1K cumulative giving for the Calendar year.  We're currently utilize the membership model to keep track of these.  It's not perfect, but it works for our purposes.  Even though our giving program is cumulative, when people set up recurring gifts or pledges that would result in their cumulative giving for the year meeting the giving society levels, we go ahead and set up the membership for that donor rather than waiting until they hit the threshold.  This ensures that they're included right away in any of our giving society mailings and promotions. 

Elizabeth Hoff

Hi, 


Not sure if this helps anyone, but I have researched each third party and see what their policy is on tax receipts. Benevity sends out tax receipts therefore, we soft credit the donor and hard credit Benvity. 


Liz 

 

Dariel Dixon

Anna Theodore:

Subbed to this thread because we also receive a non-negligible amount of donations through Benevity. Like your organisation, we've been hard crediting Benevity and soft crediting donors, but this fails to capture people as recurring donors if they regularly donate through their payroll deductions


Would love to hear other people's thoughts on capturing these donations more rigorously. Unfortunately, I don't have any suggestions yet.

Could you not create a recurring gift for the payroll deductions, and then not only soft credit the employee, but also apply to the recurring gift?  That way, it goes in as a recurring gift Pay-Cash soft credit.  I think hard crediting these gifts to the original donor comes with it's own set of issues as well, primarily making sure you aren't issuing receipts for them.

Leslie Religioso

Hi Everyone,


We receive Benevity contributions, as well. My question is how do you document any fees that are taken out? Finance needs to document the net, but Development needs to document the gross in a donor record. The discrepancy between the two affects us in that we don't balance during monthly reconciling. Thanks for sharing how you enter these types of gifts! 


~ Leslie  

Elizabeth Hoff

Hi, 


Yes I document any fees that are associated. I create a separate line and add it in the 'negative gift amount attribute description'  It helps me reconcile with accounting. I also batch weekly so accounting gets batch report weekly and we have been reconciling pretty close for the last two years due to the processes I set in place. 


Liz    

Leslie Religioso

Thank you for replying, Liz! I'm not familiar with the "negative gift amount description" Is it a custom gift attribute? 


I'll throw out an example too: 

Donor Gift Amount $100  

Fees $25

Net Gift Amount $75


So would you in the Gift Tab of a record:

Enter in Gift Amount: $100 (Gross) 

Negative Gift Amount Attribute Description: $25 (Fee)...or would you put the net here?


OR 


Enter in Gift Amount: $75 (Net) 

Negative Gift Amount Attribute Description: $25 (Fee) 


Thanks for your time!

Leslie

Shauna Kipper

How does your finance department account for general gifts (not through a third party) regarding the merchant fees. I have our business office treat the third party fees the same way. Whether the fee goes to United Way, Benevity or to Blackbaud Merchant Services, it's still a fee that is deducted from the gross donation amount.

We just call this a "cost of doing business" and they record it separately. I think they have a separate line item called "Fees". So, it would be $100 in for Annual Campaign and then $25 debited out for fees like a bill payment. 

That way, when I reconcile, I don't look at her bill payments / fee line, I only look at the Annual Campaign line, or donations.

Elizabeth Hoff

I process everything in a batch through the "backend RE" not sure if you can do it in RENXT? I assume you can, but batching is easier for me. 

But yes you always credit the Amount the Donor gave so this scenario is correct.   

Enter in Gift Amount: $100 (Gross) 

Negative Gift Amount Attribute Description: $25 (Fee)...or would you put the net here?


When you pull reports you have to remember to have that Negative Field exported so you can account for it. I can send examples of batches and the report if you need help.   

Elizabeth Hoff

When I get the EFT's or ACH's from accounting I pull the reports from the third party and I add in the fees to my batch. They account them just like you said another fee. But for Blackbaud/Luminate where our credit cards are processed I don't deduct the fees because I don't see that on my end, but accounting accounts for it. My fees that I batch usually come from checks and third parties like GIVELIVELY, Mobile Cause, Benevity, Your Cause, Front stream etc. 

Leslie Religioso

Thanks, Shauna. That's a good point. I'm unsure why but I think our business office seems to treat the fees as different from the BBMS merchant fees. I'm going to circle back and learn more. Thanks, everyone, for your insight! 

 

Leah Heit

I would love to see a sample example if you have one. My email is lheit@capoc.org. Thank you!

Miki Martin

I just came across my first Benevity check yesterday for our organization. When it was entered last month my director entered it by deducting the fees from the total amount given, since we didn't receive the full amount from the donor. When we receive checks like this, from other places like Benevity or Your Cause, we just remove the tax information from our acknowledgement letter since they've received a statement from the other organization. We always hard credit the actual donor, though; we view Benevity, Your Cause, etc. as basically the bank cutting the check since it's actually the donor's money.


As for recognizing the donors for various levels, we do something similar each year as part of our Annual Fund. In order to identify the donors eligible for the various levels (or circles) we have at our school, I have a set of queries to pull summary gifts for our fiscal year, excluding of course those anonymous donors and organizations. This last fall was the first year I've been in the position to have to handle it so I'm not sure if there's a better way. I would steer away from using a Custom Field just because those donation levels can vary from year to year. In the past when our school was on eTap they had a plethora of Custom Fields for things like that and now some records have 20+ Custom Fields we no longer use because it's tracked differently in RE.

Susan Chomsky

Hi All, We hard credit the donor and Soft Credit the Company through which they gave. I have an appeal of Employee Giving and a Package of Benevity. I do not include the fees in the amount but send Finance a note with the reports with the fee amount and the GL.

Alisa Forman

@Elizabeth Hoff How do you add fees to a batch? I've been asking about this for months and I can't seem to figure it out. None of my coworkers know!