Author Topic: Contributions from Donor Advised Funds (Read 456 times)

aglozier · January 09, 2014, 02:11:00 pm

I’m looking for advice on the best way to enter contributions from individuals who use donor advised funds. We receive a significant number of contributions from individuals (including myself) via their Omaha Community Foundation (OCF) accounts. The check is from the OCF but the individuals initiate the donations. The OCF gets the tax deduction not the individual.

The way we have been entering these contribution into CiviCRM is to record it under the individual not the OCF. We enter ‘OCF’ into the Contribution Source field so we know it is from an OCF account. We send a thank you (not a tax receipt) to the individual. The OCF doesn’t require confirmations. I considered using the Payment Method field with an OCF payment method instead of the Contribution Source field. This wouldn’t have typo errors. Would this be a good idea?

The other way we considered entering these contributions is to record it under the OCF and soft credit the individual. At the time we make our decision you could only soft credit a single individual. We have cases where we also wanted to soft credit the contribution solicitor. Thus we choose to enter these contributions under the individual.

We are revisiting this decision since CiviCRM allows multiple soft credits with improved reporting. Would you advise us to start recording these donations under the OCF and soft crediting the individual?

As a complication, the OCF holds an annual city wide online fundraising day (Omaha Gives!). Individuals can contribute to their favorite charities and sponsor organizations offer matching funds and other incentives to encourage participation. When the event is over we can download a CSV file with donors, contact information and amounts. Later we get a check for the contributions plus the incentives minus the transaction fees.

I wanted to record all the individuals in CiviCRM for future solicitations. What I did was to import the file with individual contribution data into CiviCRM thereby recording the contributions under the individuals. When the check arrived I recorded the difference between the check and the total individual contributions under the OCF. This was kind of ugly.

If I were to use soft credits to record this, I would have to manually enter (no batch import) 40+ soft credits under the OCF contribution.

How do you suggest handling this situation?

Thank You

andrewhunt · January 10, 2014, 06:59:49 am

This case is partially helped with the soft credits changes in CiviCRM 4.4. With multiple soft credits, you can split out the contribution's soft credit to multiple people~~, but each dollar can only have one soft credit~~. For example, you might have a $10,000 check from the community foundation from a handful of different donor-advised funds. You could record a $10,000 contribution from the community foundation with the following soft credits:

$5,000 for donor A
$2,000 for donor B
$1,500 for donor C
$1,000 for donor D
$500 for donor E

This meets the basic needs for your OCF payments, and it'll help in reporting where the actual contributions are coming from: it's really a $10,000 contribution from OCF, even though you want to know where the component parts come from.

Unfortunately, the contribution import doesn't allow for multiple soft credits: it just allows you to designate a column as the contact ID / email address / external ID of the contact getting all of the soft credit, so your Omaha Gives spreadsheet may be of limited use for direct import.

~~However, multiple soft credits in 4.4 doesn't allow you to give multiple credits for the same dollar.~~ Let's say Donor A's contribution was sollicited by Board Member X, and you want to record that. ~~With the way things stand, you won't be able to record that as a soft credit, because the soft credit for that part of the contribution is already given to Donor A.~~ This functionality is what's on the way in CiviCRM 4.5, which will introduce soft credit types. At that point, you'd be able to assign soft credits of different types, such as soliciting, donor-advised funds, matching gift, etc, so you might want to say that the check from OCF has a donor-advised fund soft credit to Donor A and a solicitation soft credit to Board Member X. (And maybe there might be matching gift soft credits to Donors F, G, H, and I, who made donations in response to Donor A's matching challenge, let's say.)

The simplest overview is the specification that has been driving the work:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Soft+Credit+Enhancements+-+Phase+2

You can also see the progress on the three subtasks on this issue:
http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-13832

aglozier · January 10, 2014, 09:05:58 am

Thank you for you reply. It was very helpful. Soft credits types will be very useful.

I probably wait unit 4.5 to make any procedural changes.

andrewhunt · January 10, 2014, 12:28:03 pm

I actually misstated the limitation on multiple soft credits above: you can create an unlimited number of soft credits on a contribution, and, as things stand at the moment, you can even set a soft credit for more than the contribution. (This seems like a bug, but you'd presumably know what you're doing if you're giving one contact $200 of soft credit for a $100 donation.) Sorry!

aglozier · January 11, 2014, 04:21:57 am

Thanks for the clarification. That's what I had thought. This makes the use of soft credits an option for us. I still like the idea of soft credit types that will be in 4.5.

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Author Topic: Contributions from Donor Advised Funds (Read 456 times)

aglozier

Contributions from Donor Advised Funds

andrewhunt

Re: Contributions from Donor Advised Funds

aglozier

Re: Contributions from Donor Advised Funds

andrewhunt

Re: Contributions from Donor Advised Funds

aglozier

Re: Contributions from Donor Advised Funds