Hard vs. Soft Credit when moving to constituent spouses

John Rebstock

I'm having some difficulty deciding on the best course of action with a problem my organization has, and will get worse down the line. At the moment, some proportion of our records have non-constituent spouses, and others have constituent spouses. To make sure we keep things consistent with our reporting, we've chosen for that latter category to keep one as a primary record, and the other as a secondary. We're looking to move to having one system, with constituent records for every individual, and the HoH flag determining which record is primary. However, this feels like it's going to cause reporting and acknowledgement issues with our HC/SC setup.

At the moment, for gifts from the individual, we give hard credit to the primary record, and RE defaults to giving soft credit to the spouse. (so, Joe Smith gets HC, Jane Smith gets SC) However, for DAF gifts, we give hard credit to the DAF, and soft credit to the primary record (so, Bank Charitable gets HC, Joe Smith gets SC.) This ends up causing a number of complications. For our reporting by constituency, if we pull HC only, Joe's constituency doesn't get credit for his DAF gifts. If we pull by SC only, we miss Joe's constituency on individual gifts; if we give credit to both, the dollar amount is wrong. For reporting, if we pull letters on SC, we send the letter to the wrong person if it's an individual gift. If we pull on HC, we send the letter to the wrong org if the gift originated from the DAF. If we pull both, we have to remember which letter to send and delete the wrong one.

I can't help but feel like this is only going to get more complicated when we go to full constituent spouses, where we'll have to decide between having proper giving information on the spouse record, and having the gift reporting come out in the right place, based on who we soft credit and how, and whether we set the reports to look for HC only or SC recipients.

What I'd love to have available is a three-tier system, where I could give a DAF, or Joe if it's an individual gift, legal credit, give Joe primary credit either way, give Jane secondary credit on all of those gifts, and just set the reports to pull primary credit, but the system isn't set up for that. If you were moving to a situation like this one, what system would you choose, and how would you set up reports to account for that?

Austen Brown

@John Rebstock - I recommend you take a look at @Bill Connors bbcon 2018 presentation “How Would You Enter THIS Gift?”, you'll want to focus on slides 13 on: https://billconnors.com/wp-content/uploads/2018-Bill-Connors-How-Would-You-Enter-THIS-Gift.pdf . Bill covers a school of thought where the donor gets HC for all giving, even through DAF or third parties.

You have done a great job of thinking through what you'll need for reporting, which is exactly where you should start when considering a coding change. There are a wide variety of ways to do things in RE, I have a preferred way that differs from this solution but Bill's recommendation may be the solution you're looking for or one you can work with to evolve it find a solution that works best for your org.

When making a change to coding, I recommend you also adjust the last 3-5 years of gifts as well. That way you are able to do historical year-over-year reporting without having to do manual adjustments in excel outside of the system.