Pulling Soft Credit Info into Export

Thanks @Dariel Dixon!

For folks who are very comfortable with conditional merge fields, there's probably a better way to do this. But for folks who aren't, I'd suggest the following:

Create two Gift Acknowledgement Letters in RE:Mail module, one for “hard credit” donors (the DAF, etc.), one for “soft credit” donors (who directed the gift).

Your “Hard Credit” letter should have the soft credit settings set to “Soft Credit Gifts To: Donor.”

Your “Soft Credit” letter should have the soft credit settings set to “Soft Credit Gifts To: Soft credit recipients / Use Distribution on Gift.”

Click Export to get the spreadsheet you need for each mail merge. Do two separate mail merges for hard credits and soft credits. Your soft credit mail merge letter template generally should not include standard tax receipt language.

Some extras you could also consider:

You could use another field to isolate gifts with soft credits and include that in your Gift Acknowledgement filters. You might have a Letter Code of “Donor Advised Fund” or “Third Party Giving” which is EXCLUDED from your Hard Credit Letter so that you don't have to manually delete those letters to Fidelity Charitable, etc. (assuming you don't mail letters to those folks).

I also like to add a note in the Gift Reference that summarizes the gift, for example: “HC: Fidelity Charitable; SC: Barack Obama.”

I normally include the gift reference field in my merge templates but I make sure it is highlighted yellow so it gets updated or removed. I then usually use that note to adjust the letter to say “Thank you for your gift of X which we received from Fidelity Charitable on [Gift Date].”

That is an excellent solution! We have a template for those kinds of letters in a conditional merge, but the soft credit has had us stumped as well. I think the idea of two letters will help eliminate that.