Sharing donation amounts with solicitors

Cristy Balcells

Hello, I am looking for guidance about sharing donor details including the amount of the donation with soft credit solicitors. Some solicitors in the organization (outside of staff) want full details about their donors - dollar amount of donations, addresses, etc.

We are concerned about donor privacy policy. Obviously the donor details aren't shared if they choose to be anonymous, but do you routinely share the full dollar amount of all donations when soft credited?

HOW do you share this information? A monthly letter? A dashboard in RE? RE Mail merge and send letters to the soft credits?

We are new to RE and trying to streamline all of these processes. Any SOPs would be VERY helpful. thank you

Cristy

JoAnn Strommen

Agh, my post didn't post!


First, welcome to the RE world.


In my unposted reply, I asked what you mean by soft-credited solicitors. Are you soft-crediting the solicitor the person asking for the gift? How does you organization define 'soft-credit'? I'm not aware of many orgs that soft-credit solicitors if we mean the same thing by those words.


For our annual campaign volunteer solicitors had name/address of their prospects and saw completed paperwork turned back to them for gifts/pledges.


There was just a post today where Sheila Wortham shared a doc on soft-credits. There are also lots of post about how it is used by others if you just search forums for 'soft-credit.'


Asking questions as you start is great. You definitely want to get started on the right foot.

Cristy Balcells

Thank you for your help and for seeking clarity on the question!

Ok, say a member of our community (rare disease organization) with an affected child has a birthday, so 10 people donate in her family's honor.

We soft credit that family for those 10 donations.

She wants to know who donated in her family's honor.

How do we simplify the process of letting her know, and what degree of information is acceptable?

There are only about 100 affected individuals in our population that fundraise but when they do they tend to get a lot of gifts from family and friends.

If my terms are not correct, I would appreciate the feedback so I can search for support (I've searched soft credit at length but am not seeing anything about how you inform the solicitor)

Dariel Dixon

As a general rule, we don't share amount information with anyone. If they aren't staff and have access to see it in the database, then they don't need to know.


If they are volunteers, or are somehow affiliated, then I think it's within reason to show summary information. We do this on occasion for tribute gifts. However, we will never provide how much Mr. John Smith gave to OUR ORGANIZATION. That's our gift, and will remain confidential between the donor and the organization. And as staff, we are held to maintain that confidentiality.


I think it's always easy to fall back on the AFP Donor Bill of Rights. https://afpglobal.org/donor-bill-rights. It's pretty straightforward.


EDIT: Let me add this addendum. In regards to tribute gifts, I believe it's within reason to give donor contact information iff (iff is my favorite mathematical term) you have made the donor aware of that as a standard procedure or it has been requested. Every donor needs to have the opportunity to have that information to remain anonymous. I can give a summary of the amount received from the tribute. What JoAnn Strommen‍ said is true (as is almost always the case), the tribute module makes this very easy.

JoAnn Strommen

Thanks for the more detailed description.

Do you have the tribute module? That makes handling gifts in someone's honor/memory a lot easier.


The orgs I've worked would not soft-credit in this situation. Soft-credits are defined as someone with control/ownership of the funds. Examples for us would be spouse, owner of a company, DAF, Yes, some orgs do SC honor gifts but others do not. When soft-crediting one should also be thinking of how it will affect reporting in the future. When looking at lifetime giving or giving levels, will you include SC? For our definition, yes. For gifts received in my honor, no. That is not my money or money "I" gave. How your org defines SC, will help determine how gifts are entered. (I see looking closer at the document shared, not all their SCs would fit our definition.)


Without the tribute module, I would consider linking these gifts to an appeal of say "Birthday Gifts" and either an attribute or package with child's name. You can filter and run reports on gifts with that info. You could put child's name in reference field. You also have the option to create a solicitor relationship for the gifts and could report using that field. If they have that relationship you can report on funds raised without soft-crediting.


Our policy for sharing info with families for memorial or honorariums, is to provide family with donor name and address, but no $ figure.

Faith Murray

We typically do not share dollar amounts with non-staff people. We will occasionally "spit back out" dollar amounts to families of deceased tributes when the family is the one who passes the bundle of checks along to us anyhow, has already seen all the gifts and just wants confirmation of processing. Otherwise, it's just name and address for them to write thank-you notes.