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RE Householding Reporting

Alex Wong

Hi all,

Our org currently is having 1 constituent record per couple, meaning, 1 constituent record and spouse non-constituent. Generally it is the husband being the main constituent record while the wife is non-constituent record.

We are considering going to 1 constituent record per individual person and then use the householding functionalities of RE. I understand the mailing implication, however, I am in need of some advise of how financial reporting (gift reporting). Obviously if wife gave a donation, it goes on her record, and husband giving will result in his direct credit. I know RE has some business rule on auto-soft crediting, however, is it really the route to take? (husband direct credit soft to wife, wife direct credit soft to husband). How will report be done such that we can correctly (without double counting) report on the household's contribution (and ultiamtely determine their donor category).

Thank you

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Comments

Austen Brown

Hi Alex - Your concerns are valid. I've managed both of these scenarios and even a version where there was a mix of both, which I wouldn't recommend. Obviously, there are pros and cons to each scenario, but I prefer to keep it simple with spouses sharing one record. By spliting them you will have deal with Head of Household (HOH) classifications, additional soft credits, and complications to household reporting. Ultimately it is up to what is best for your org.

To learn more on the process to promote non-constituents, check out KB Article #38760. I will caution that once this change is made, it is difficult to reverse.

Alex Wong

Hi Austen,

Thank you for your information. It sounds like reporting for when “everyone is individual constituent” record is a pain that RE (and RE NXT) does not take good care of in functionality (unlike mailing having HoH option that automatically does it for you).

I'm hoping to hear more about how others have done it when their database has opt to do this route (everyone is individual constituent).

Thank you

Karen Diener

I've worked in databases that really do require separate records. It was a school using Blackbaud's school solutions, and in order for each parent to have a separate login, each needed their own record. There was all manner of panic at the school when this started and it was not an issue at all. The biggest issue was a lack of understanding about how to make the system work for you.

I am personally a big proponent of separate records when warranted. I would never do it “just because". As soon as the non-constituent spouse has a reason to have their own record, give it to them. The reasons will vary from one organization to another, but I typically see the following as primary reasons:

Needing a unique login, as in the school website example
The spouse develops their own unique relationship to the organization, such as board or committee membership
Event attendance. I have spent A LOT of hours exporting many combinations of data and cleaning up event records an organization that had a large presence of female-only events. The husband was added to event and the wife was listed as his guest. We finally got it cleaned up and it saved a lot of work.
Non-constituent spouse becomes an honor/memorial.

There may be others. But when I start to see a lot of workarounds to accommodate the one record rule, I always take a step back and ask about it. There are quite a few posts in the community about this, so please do some searching and see what others have had to say.

Karen

Alex Wong

Thank you Karen.

I did try to do some search on householding before making this new post and was not able to find any good solution/suggestion on reporting.

What you said is absoluately true and other reasons (one we have to deal with) is “online presense”. Having separate record is being wanted for that purpose, being able to identify each individual and their email so we can correctly greet them (instead of Dear John and Mary in the email greeting).

I'm not looking for reason why we should or shouldn't do unique record per individual, but rather how are you reporting on their donation. What do you do in your situation?

Alex

Dariel Dixon

Reporting can be a bit of a chore. I think reporting on one household is relatively straightforward, as you can just adjust the soft credit reporting as needed. One thing about soft credits is if you set it up properly to automatically credit the spouse, you only have to report on one of the records, and you have the reports to show both the hard and soft credits, therefore seeing the entire household on that one report. It does get tricky reporting on summary reports or end of year statements.

I think it's worth considering how you would deal with spouses with different constituencies. In my database, those spouses are set up with their own records almost strictly for that reason.

Karen Diener

Hi Alex,

Sorry if I answered everything but your question!

As always, “how do you report” depends on what you are reporting. Everything organization I worked for as a DBA, and work with now as a consultant, has been almost exclusively interested in household giving. So nearly every report I run includes soft credits. That part is never difficult; I think where it can get difficult is when there is inconsistency in how soft credits are used in the database.

Karen

Alex Wong

Karen Diener:
Hi Alex,
Sorry if I answered everything but your question!
As always, “how do you report” depends on what you are reporting. Everything organization I worked for as a DBA, and work with now as a consultant, has been almost exclusively interested in household giving. So nearly every report I run includes soft credits. That part is never difficult; I think where it can get difficult is when there is inconsistency in how soft credits are used in the database.
Karen

Hi Karen,

Yes, I think that is the situation. Blackbaud doesn't have functionalities built into Householding for financial reporting purposes like they did with mailing. (Mailing you have a option to check only mail HoH). If only Blackbaud had build the same thing when running report (i.e. Donor Category) to select such option as to “report HoH” where the HoH will be reported with the spouse's giving without any double counting.

From what I gathered everywhere, it seems we need to manually deal with reporting through:

Tagging the HoH constituent record (constituent attribute)
- On record without Householding, we need to do the same tag (otherwise single individual won't show up)
Run report using Gift Soft Credit option that is “both” and “amount distribution of grid”
- with criteria of the HoH constituent attribute

Sounds about right?

Alex

Leslie McGeady

An individual record is considered it's own HoH, so a single person is HoH. If both constituents have their own records then the HoH is indicated on spouse relationship tab. I don't think an attribute is needed (but it is Friday afternoon and brain cells are depleting).

Check out this KB article https://kb.blackbaud.com/knowledgebase/articles/Article/40672

When reporting on married spouses, mark soft credit gifts to donor only. That way gift is counted once in its entirety.

Hopefully this helps

Alex Wong

Leslie McGeady:
An individual record is considered it's own HoH, so a single person is HoH. If both constituents have their own records then the HoH is indicated on spouse relationship tab. I don't think an attribute is needed (but it is Friday afternoon and brain cells are depleting).

Check out this KB article https://kb.blackbaud.com/knowledgebase/articles/Article/40672https://kb.blackbaud.com/knowledgebase/articles/Article/40672https://kb.blackbaud.com/knowledgebase/articles/Article/40672https://kb.blackbaud.com/knowledgebase/articles/Article/40672

When reporting on married spouses, mark soft credit gifts to donor only. That way gift is counted once in its entirety.

Hopefully this helps

Hi, the concept of HoH is only applicable and useable in Mailing, which is the problem I'm asking about.

For running report and in query, how are you going to “identify” which record to report on and how is that record going to receive all “credit”?

Example:
John Smith is married with Mary Smith
John Smith gave 2/3/2021 $500 direct credit on his record soft credit to Mary Smith
Mary Smith gave 3/4/2021 $800 direct credit on her record soft credit to John Smith
How would you run such that the “household” of John and Mary is a $1300 level donor?
(the HoH “checkbox” is on a relationship between John and Mary's record, more specifically it is actually on Mary's relationship record with John)

Thanks,
Alex

Helen Wieger

My org does create constituent records for both spouses when warranted. Since RE does not have a straightforward way of reporting on spouses as a couple (we also use soft credits for donor advised funds, business giving, United Way gifts, etc., so just looking at soft credits is not useful), we've chosen to record all giving on the head-of-household's record, soft-credit to the non-HoH spouse. That way we can run hard-credit only reports for the HoH and see the household giving.

We also have individual addressee and salutation for the spouse on the HoH's record, so we can send mail from the HoH record to the individual. (eg. a receipt for a gift given by the woman at the women's fundraising event can be addressed only to the wife, even if the gift is hard credited on the husband's record).

Alex Wong

Helen Wieger:
My org does create constituent records for both spouses when warranted. Since RE does not have a straightforward way of reporting on spouses as a couple (we also use soft credits for donor advised funds, business giving, United Way gifts, etc., so just looking at soft credits is not useful), we've chosen to record all giving on the head-of-household's record, soft-credit to the non-HoH spouse. That way we can run hard-credit only reports for the HoH and see the household giving.
We also have individual addressee and salutation for the spouse on the HoH's record, so we can send mail from the HoH record to the individual. (eg. a receipt for a gift given by the woman at the women's fundraising event can be addressed only to the wife, even if the gift is hard credited on the husband's record).

Thank you for sharing what you do within your organization.

Question: when you say “run hard-credit only reports for the HoH and see the household giving”, how are you identifying the HoH? (meaning how do you exclude the “non-HoH-spouse” from your reporting? or do you not specifically exclude, as the non-HoH-spouse would not have any hard credit gift, so that record's giving would be $0)

2nd Question: we also use soft credit on DAF too, meaning the gift is direct credit on the DAF, and soft credit to the actual donor. if you run your report only on hard credit, then the donor who gave through DAF gift amount wouldn't be counted toward his giving, wouldn't that be incorrect?

Aldera Chisholm

I have struggled with this so much over the years. I do wish it was “acceptable” to just have one record for a couple and have it be first name “Bob and Mary” - especially now that we've starting using NXT for email, and it wants to mail merge First name but not Addressee. And, we have a LOT of spouses who enter both names in the First Name field of the donor form which takes oodles of clean-up. Overall though, I end up putting the person who we most often deal with as the constituent, and the spouse as a non-constituent relationship. We put them each as constituents if they register for events separately or in some other way maintain unique relationships with us.

Jennifer Branstrom

@Alex Wong…our school does seperate records as well, but one of things I am struggling with is when reporting on soft credits like when a parent wants to soft credit their child on their gift. So, now it is the husband - direct credit - spouse - soft credit and daughter - soft credit. What are the appropriate parameters to pick when reporting on the soft credits? Anytime we pick donor only or soft credit receipents - our total are different. How do we prevent double counting these dollars? Also when running donor category reports for Annual Reporting, we want the daughter to fall into the appropriate category and especially going forward if she contributes on her own in the future.

Thanks,

Jen B.

JoAnn Strommen

@Jennifer Branstrom
Can say I've never considered SC child for parents' gifts. For us, it doesn't fit definition of SC. Especially down the road for donor category reports. Are you sure you want parents' gifts to count toward an adult child's giving totals?

If you're reporting on $ you're going to only want the hard credit. If you're working on a donor list, you would consider SC. Yes, otherwise pulling SC in any $ report will result in inflated amounts. Tis the way RE works.

Alex Wong

@Jennifer Branstrom:
@Alex Wong…our school does seperate records as well, but one of things I am struggling with is when reporting on soft credits like when a parent wants to soft credit their child on their gift. So, now it is the husband - direct credit - spouse - soft credit and daughter - soft credit. What are the appropriate parameters to pick when reporting on the soft credits? Anytime we pick donor only or soft credit receipents - our total are different. How do we prevent double counting these dollars? Also when running donor category reports for Annual Reporting, we want the daughter to fall into the appropriate category and especially going forward if she contributes on her own in the future.
Thanks,
Jen B.

Since the post, we still did not make decision to change from 1 constituent for couple to individual record for each. So I can't really comment on this way of record keeping.

However, given our investigation into this, I can provide some insight:

RE and RENXT does not provide a good mean of reporting in this situation.
in your example: husband direct credit, wife and daughter soft credit.
- A RE NXT report will have giving the full amount of the gift to the husband, and the soft credit amount in soft credit grid to wife and daughter. (if full amount of gift was soft credited to wife and daughter, then the gift would be triple counted)
- A RE database view report will depends on “soft credit” option used. unless you use direct credit in this option, you will double/triple count.
One important thing to consider is the purpose of the reporting. If the purpose of report is financially driven, I will always use direct credit option. If the purpose of report is fundraising driven, then I run with soft credit option using soft credit grid amount. I never use full credit to both. By no mean my way is “the” way. But it is what we found to be most accurate given the way we use soft credit in our business/finance process

The issue with RE and RE NXT is the support for “family” record doesn't exist. While you can play with spouse relation and head of household, there is always a manual maneuver you have to do. Not to mention it doesn't take into consideration of “family” giving where son/daughter (those too young to be their own record) and/or private foundation/company giving.

I have thought of a way to do this “family” style reporting but have yet to implement it. However, it does require completely custom reporting, which my plan is to use Power BI using data warehouse data I setup to pull using SKY API.

If I ever get to implement it and have success, I will post on community.

Carlene Johnson

@JoAnn Strommen:
@Jennifer Branstrom
Can say I've never considered SC child for parents' gifts. For us, it doesn't fit definition of SC. Especially down the road for donor category reports. Are you sure you want parents' gifts to count toward an adult child's giving totals?

Hi JoAnn! In the K-12 sector it is irritatingly common for parents to make gifts on behalf of their minor children and/or for their (young) adult children because they want their kid to be listed in the Annual Report and/or their child doesn't have their own credit card.

It creates a lot of frustrating situations for reporting, for sure! In addition to the reporting headaches it also doesn't teach children to be philanthropic. The young alumni are getting all the benefits of being listed in the Annual Report but don't ever have to make any effort to consider giving.

One way of addressing this is to start a program which encourages parents to match a gift made directly from their child as a way of encouraging philanthropy in the younger set. However those programs are hard to get off the ground.

From a technical standpoint, creating gift entry policies that follow the “Bill Connors method" of hard crediting the child and using an attribute to track the “name on check” for the parents would work. Receipts would need to be issued to parent not the child. Again, making this type of shift in data management is a hard undertaking for some orgs.

Karintha Marshall

Came across this post looking for answers on household identification also. We're a one record per person shop for many of the reasons Karen Deiner outlined in her longer post here.

We have the Membership module and I'm wondering if anyone with the module has tried using a membership category for household grouping. Membership records are designed to link multiple constituents to one record (the membership)…..it may not resolve many issues with financial reporting, but the grouping mechanism for households may have utility for other use cases.

If anyone's tried this method (or thought it through extensively which, admittedly, I have not - early stage brainstorm here), I'd love to hear perspectives on that model.