Soft-crediting a donor when you don't know the $ amount?

Mary Schultz

We receive funds from a giving program (Thrivent Choice) where our constituents can choose to allocate money from Thrivent to our nonprofit. In similar situations with payments we receive from other organizations, we always are notified of the $ amount that the constituent chose to allocate to our organization, and we soft-credit those individuals for that $ amount. Thrivent Choice, however, will only tell you the names of those who allocated funds, but not how much they chose to allocate. Our current policy is to divide up the total deposit amount equally among however many names are on the report and soft-credit each for that $ amount. I'm considering moving to change this policy, but I'd like to know what any other organizations are doing in this sort of situation. Would it make sense to just soft-credit $0 to each constituent when there are multiple names on a deposit report instead of trying to determine an arbitrary $ amount? Other suggestions I haven't considered?

JoAnn Strommen

I remember Thrivent being a bit unique. If the donation was from one person, I would know the amount. If more than one they would not disclose amount.


I don't feel dividing equally is best option as in my experience amount varied significantly among those listed when I looked at their other gifts. I credited a small amount - you can make it unique like $1.01 - to each donor and made note on record of exact gift amount unknown. I entered an amount so constituent would pull when running TY letters.

Heather MacKenzie

I was going to go with the $0 idea, but I like JoAnn Strommen‍'s idea better. Make it a penny or 99 cents or something so it's obvious, but then you can pull into thank you letters, pull for mailings, etc.

Veronica Williams

It is important to remember what Thrivent tells organizations every time they send "Thrivent Choice" dollars. It is a donation from Thrivent, not from the individuals. At Lyngblomsten, we have a Constituent Attribute of Thrivent Choice that is a Yes/No attribute. We keep track of the year in which the person has Thrivent Choice (by virtue of purchasing insurance/financial products from Thrivent). When the Thrivent donation arrives, we take the member info from Thrivent's e-mail and copy it into the Notes for Thrivent's gift, then double-check that the Attribute year is up-to-date. We also choose annually to write to Thrivent Choice members; sometimes we hear back from a person that he/she is no longer a member.

Joel Raasch

We use the $0 soft-credit which is the "link" that allows us to create a "thank you" letter (via Mail in RE) to let the Thrivent member know we got the Choice Dollars from Thrivent and to thank them for choosing us. We explain by saying something to the effect that Thrivent does not divulge the amount per member. We also have solicit code that we use to exclude such a member/donor from these thank you letters in the event he/she tells us we need not bother sending them these confirmation letters. (That very rarely happens, though.)