Reporting with DAF donors vs DAF Sponsoring orgs

Elizabeth Fahling
Elizabeth Fahling
Sixth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud CRM™ General Discussions

Hey there BBCRM Community! I'm wondering how other orgs handle fundraising program reporting when DAF donations are entered in the system with self credit going to the sponsoring org and the individual gets recognition credit. To avoid the risk of double counting, most of our reports will be based on the revenue, not recognition, but then we miss the whole picture with DAF Donors.

How do other orgs handle this?

Comments

  • Aaren Ballinger
    Aaren Ballinger
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    Hi Elizabeth!

    The most common solution I've seen is to add a column to your query /report for recognition credit > constituent name. That way you can still pull based off revenue but see who the initiating donor was. You could potentially restrict this by recognition credit type and select only credits related to DAF so it doesn't make the report too messy.

    Could that be a workable solution or is there other information you are looking to capture? How are these reports pulled - using query? OOB CRM reports?

  • Elizabeth Fahling
    Elizabeth Fahling
    Sixth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1
    Hi Aaren, we have done that for one off reporting, but for including these donors in full campaign reports around frequency, retention, etc. using recognition double counts. I'm wondering if other CRM users report on DAF donors completely separate from revenue reports or if they enter the revenue to the individual and give recognition to the sponsoring org.
  • Aaren Ballinger
    Aaren Ballinger
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    Elizabeth Fahling:
    Hi Aaren, we have done that for one off reporting, but for including these donors in full campaign reports around frequency, retention, etc. using recognition double counts. I'm wondering if other CRM users report on DAF donors completely separate from revenue reports or if they enter the revenue to the individual and give recognition to the sponsoring org.

    Yes I think this is an age old struggle between development and finance departments! I've seen it done many different ways but in my view the best solution is to hard credit the donor and soft credit the foundation. My thought is that your CRM is meant to track your relationship with the donor - not the DAF! As you've pointed out, hard crediting the foundation makes it so hard to see the full picture of your relationship with that donor and steward them properly. The procedure to skip the tax acknowledgment when the gift is made is so much more straightforward then having to fix every query or report in perpetuity!

    If you are unable to change your configuration, I would pull based on recognition for things like the frequency and retention reports you referenced if possible. In those types of reports you are usually just looking at if a donor gave or not and not totalling up amounts - so double counting shouldn't be an issue.

    Another possible solution - tag the gift on the foundation record as a DAF gift - this could be done with a revenue attribute. Typically the recognition credit to the initiating donor has a recognition credit type of Donor Advised Fund. You could then incorporate some more complex logic in your reports to exclude revenue with the DAF attribute, but include soft credits with recognition credit type = DAF. This type of logic could also be pulled into custom smartfields that could aid in reporting on a donor's true total giving.

Categories