Attaching an Organization Donation to an Individual for purpose of an event

[jansmath3]

I hope this is the correct place to place this, but I've hit a wall on this and I'm hoping someone has some suggestions.

The crux of the problem is that we need to create a fairly complex report that comprises a total of 49 fields which is the master list for our annual gala.  The fields pull from the individual contact record, contribution record over the previous three years and an as of yet created event for online and offline registration. (historically there has been no CRM event tracking, online registration or bulk emailing component to the gala)

For this year, we are going to pull three separate records (a contact export, sybunt report, and an event export) and merge them in excel due to time constraints, but my ultimate goal is to create a single report.

Here is where my question comes into play.  We have approximately 2 dozen organizations who have donated to our organization, for which their leaders attend our gala.  The donations need to stay under the organization, but this donation needs to be reflected in the report.  The report will show individuals attending the gala as well as their Current Employer (ie the organization the donation is attached to).

Ultimately, it boils down to how can I reflect an Organization's donation to an attendee of an event?

Here is the work around I'm thinking of implementing and what I would ideally like to do.

• The work around would involve expanding the report to include organizations, create a new relationship for "Representative for Gala", then change the greeting in the organization to reflect this. The problems with this solution is that it will not reflect if the individual needs to have an invite sent to their personal residence and will not include many of the custom fields and notes we've created for the individual.
• Ideally, I would like the donation to be attributed to the individual for the purpose of this report.  I've looked into soft credits, but this would require a lot of human interaction to make sure any donation by an organization is applied as a soft credit and someone would have to monitor online donations to add the soft credit as they come.  Furthermore, every time the report is compiled, the soft credits would have to be taken from the amount field in the civicrm_contribution_soft table and moved to the appropriate donation field.

   
That is all I can think of.  I hope I'm just overlooking something obvious or there is a standard practice for these situations.  Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

[petednz]

have you read up / discounted the idea of using 'soft credit' on those contributions from the Orgs so they have a link to the individuals. not something i have ever used but if you don't know about it, it may get you a step towards what you want

[jansmath3]

have you read up / discounted the idea of using 'soft credit' on those contributions from the Orgs so they have a link to the individuals. not something i have ever used but if you don't know about it, it may get you a step towards what you want

Thanks for the response petednz.

I did look into soft credits.  I may go that direction, but outside of adding extra columns to the already ridiculously long report, someone would have to cut and paste the soft credits into the donation columns on the report and incoming online donations would have to be monitored and allocated the appropriate soft credits, which typically leads to confusion and errors in our office, but that may be the best option.