Facebook Donation Donor Credit

Samantha Wilson
Samantha Wilson
Seventh Anniversary Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Altru® General Discussions
Hello! 

I am hoping that people would be so kind as to share your current best practices for how you credit donors from Facebook donations. With Facebook donations we are able to pull a report that shows the individuals who donated to that sum payment, however there is little other information given of the donor (email if we are lucky). I would like to know what you do to credit the donors? 

Do you apply the total payment to your Facebook constituent and then soft credit each individual for the amount they donated (entering them into the CRM with the limited information) or are you only soft crediting donors that are already in your database? 


I would love to hear your thoughts. 


Thanks!

Samantha Wilson 

Comments

  • Crystal Bruce
    Crystal Bruce admin
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 February 2026 Monthly Challenge First Reply
    Hi! What product are you using?
  • Samantha Wilson
    Samantha Wilson
    Seventh Anniversary Facilitator 1

    Crystal Bruce:

    Hi! What product are you using?

    Hi Crystal,

    Great question. We are using Altru

  • Crystal Bruce
    Crystal Bruce admin
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 February 2026 Monthly Challenge First Reply
    Great! I'm going to move this conversation in the Altru Community forums for more answers. Thanks!
  • Samantha Wilson
    Samantha Wilson
    Seventh Anniversary Facilitator 1

    Crystal Bruce:

    Great! I'm going to move this conversation in the Altru Community forums for more answers. Thanks!

    Thank you so much! 

  • Tamara Christensen
    Tamara Christensen
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant
    Hi Samantha,

    Wow, I do something completely different!  I pretty much think of the donation coming from the person and just using FB as a payment vehicle. What I did was set up a Facebook donations appeal instead of a Facebook Constituent.  However, I think that I should probably do that too.  In which case, I would still apply the donation payment to the Constituent and then soft credit Facebook. This puts the amount on the Constituent record and adds to things like their giving smart fields. 

    For other similar situations, we did try doing it the other way - add the donation to the check-giving organization and then soft crediting the Constituent, however, it just didn't seem to work the way we wanted it to so we just reversed it.

    The bigger problem we have (probably because we have a small volume of Facebook donations) is that they don't disburse the money very often. The last payment they sent was last month and it included 2019 donations. I have started putting in the donations that we haven't received the money for yet as pledges. We just have to remember to go look for them in Facebook as they don't seem to notify us automatically.

    I hope this helps - I'm still the learning curve!

    Tamara
  • Tina Edwards
    Tina Edwards
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1
    Hi Samantha:


    We are adding the donations to constituent Facebook and soft crediting any donors we already have in the database. 


    Tina Edwards
  • Samantha Wilson
    Samantha Wilson
    Seventh Anniversary Facilitator 1

    Tina Edwards:

    Hi Samantha:


    We are adding the donations to constituent Facebook and soft crediting any donors we already have in the database. 


    Tina Edwards

    Thanks Tina for the info. This is the route we are thinking of going because we do not have much besides a first and last name (very few emails). 

  • Samantha Wilson
    Samantha Wilson
    Seventh Anniversary Facilitator 1

    Tamara Christensen:

    Hi Samantha,

    Wow, I do something completely different!  I pretty much think of the donation coming from the person and just using FB as a payment vehicle. What I did was set up a Facebook donations appeal instead of a Facebook Constituent.  However, I think that I should probably do that too.  In which case, I would still apply the donation payment to the Constituent and then soft credit Facebook. This puts the amount on the Constituent record and adds to things like their giving smart fields. 

    For other similar situations, we did try doing it the other way - add the donation to the check-giving organization and then soft crediting the Constituent, however, it just didn't seem to work the way we wanted it to so we just reversed it.

    The bigger problem we have (probably because we have a small volume of Facebook donations) is that they don't disburse the money very often. The last payment they sent was last month and it included 2019 donations. I have started putting in the donations that we haven't received the money for yet as pledges. We just have to remember to go look for them in Facebook as they don't seem to notify us automatically.

    I hope this helps - I'm still the learning curve!

    Tamara

    Hi Tamara,

    Thanks for the info! I appreciate it. Its a weird situation because we do not receive much donor information from Facebook, and I am worried about having unusable data in the CRM. 

  • Debbie McKenzie
    Debbie McKenzie
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    We also enter the donation on the constituent record with a reference of "via Facebook".  So far roughly 90% of the donations have been from people already in our database.  

Categories