Author Topic: Best practices: individual vs. household contributions (hard vs. soft credit) (Read 1968 times)

dbsavage · October 22, 2009, 01:15:08 pm

Hi,

I'm working with a large set of Civi records that include individuals who are part of households and have made contributions to our organization. In some cases the contributions are associated with individual records, in others with households; I'm looking to establish a best practice for entering contributions that accounts for both individuals and households, without creating duplicate contribution records. I will also eventually be looking to correct the existing contribution records (of which there are a significant amount) to conform with this policy.

One approach I've considered is entering the contribution under the household record, and soft crediting the individual members of the household for the contribution. I'm wondering, though, if this is unnecessarily complicated, or if just associating the contribution with the household does the job (since households are connected via relationships to their individual members anyway). For instance, retroactively creating all the necessary soft credits would be a pain, even if done via an import. Also, I'm wondering how I would deal with the potential circumstance of an individual becoming associated with or 'entering' a household - my only option then, I'm assuming, would be to manually delete the contribution and recreate it under the household record.

The essential question I'm looking to answer is: in cases where both individual and household records exist, is it 'better' to attribute contributions to an individual or the household ('better' both from the perspective of creating new records and of correcting old ones)? Any insight or advice would be appreciated....

Thanks -

Donald Lobo · October 22, 2009, 02:13:22 pm

my 2 cents:

1. Its better to associate data with the closest level object. If an individual makes a contribution associate it there and use a soft credit link for the household record (if u need to see it in the household record).

2. Most donations are ultimately made by an individual, so not sure if a donation will ever be attributed directly to a household

3. Since Civi really does not have any functionality regarding rolling up donations in a custom search or report, you'll need to write this. You can make these functions a lot smarter and allow you to aggregate data in different ways (i.e. roll all donations to a household, do all hard donations, show only soft credits etc). If you do so, please contribute your search/report back

4. Automating the soft credit link from an individual to a household can be easily done either via a regular cron job or via a hook. The main issue is maintaining and pdating the household data and relationships

lobo

krystee · December 03, 2009, 08:02:19 pm

Can you expand a bit more on option #4. I think this will work for our installation and I would love a little more information.

Thanks!

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Author Topic: Best practices: individual vs. household contributions (hard vs. soft credit) (Read 1968 times)

dbsavage

Best practices: individual vs. household contributions (hard vs. soft credit)

Donald Lobo

Re: Best practices: individual vs. household contributions (hard vs. soft credit)

krystee

Re: Best practices: individual vs. household contributions (hard vs. soft credit)