CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

hey ian:

can you try to expand a bit more on soft credits and the various features it can potentially have. Will help us understand it better. A couple of related questions:

1. when/how does the org decide that Jill gets a soft credit for that donation. i.e. where is this information extracted from?

2. can jill get a "partial" soft credit, i.e. $10

3. can jill and harry both get a soft credit for the same donation (full amount) or partial amount that equal to the full amount

4. how do soft credits interact with pledges / recurring donations

thanx for planning to incorporate into core. This should be possible and we can work with you to make it happen. Depending on your timing we can shoot to get this into the 2.2 release

lobo

Thinking aloud here ... our next release includes a Personal Campaign Page (PCP) feature which is basically a specific sub-case of the Jill-runs-marathon / soft-credit scenario you've described. This implementation adds an optional foreign key to each contribution record which links the contribution to a personal campaign page that it "came from". Details are here:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/PCP+-+Phase+1+-+Specification

Should we look at generalizing this data model a bit so it can be used for other variations of "soft credits" - i.e. allows direct linkage to the "fundraising contact" record - rather than only "through the PCP"?

Hi folks,

I have consulted a bit more with my client and have also just gone though the Personal Campaign Page (PCP) spec that Dave linked to.

The PCP spec looks really good, though it generally looks much more complex than what I'm looking to do.

In our case, we are really just looking to have one additional field added to the 'contribution' form, to link the contribution to the fundraiser's contact record. So I would imagine some sort of auto-complete (Ajax) field to select 'Jill' and assign Jack's contribution as a 'soft credit' to her.

There is no need for 'partial' soft credits or for more than one person to get the 'soft credit' for the same contribution. And in my case, soft credits don't interact at all with recurring donations or pledges.

So, my requirement is to simply have one donation linked with the donor's contact record as well as a second contact (the sponsor). Then somewhere within the view of the sponsor's contact record we want to see a list of donations 'soft credited' to that person, either in the 'contributions' tab or on a separate one. And we would want to be able to produce reports based upon amounts 'soft credited' to contacts.

This client is not going to be using contribution pages at all. All donations are actually collected via other online systems or by manual means and will be entered into CiviCRM manually or via the import function (importing batches of donation data from CSV).

So that's what I'm trying to do! I suspect that this overlaps with the PCP feature in terms of the API for crediting contributions to a fundraiser, but a lot of the other functionality described there relates more to contribution pages and so is not directly relevant for me at the moment.

Hi Lobo,

That sounds like a reasonable way to do it. I'd be willing to at least start work on a 'Contact Reference' field and see how far I get. Is there any reference anywhere to identify which codebase files relate to custom field types?

Hi,

I've had a look at the code relating to custom field types and I have to say I wish there were a clearer API around the definition of field types. That's not to criticize the system, but to say that adding the new field type doesn't appear that straightforward to me. So, I can probably do some work on the Contact Reference field type, but I think that might be something I'll get to next month.

Since my client is quite keen to be able to import their existing data into CiviCRM in order to start using the system, and because most of their contributions will be imported from CSV in their day-to-day use anyway, I'm thinking that I might work on the infrastructure to store and display the sponsor information for each contribution and then come back to the UI for selecting sponsors. I can just use a custom integer field that stores the contact ID until the 'Contact Reference' field type is usable.

I know how to code custom searches for producing reports, so that should be fine. At this point I think I want to work on some code for displaying a list of soft credits in a sponsors view. Looking at the documentation on CiviCRM's hooks, it looks like I should create a Drupal module that uses 'hook_civicrm_links' to create a new tab to display the soft credits for a contact. Does that sound like a reasonable way to go about it? I assume that's what you mean by the 'tab hook'.

Thanks,
-Ian

Hi Michał,

I have had a look at the PCP functionality in the sandbox installation and it looks very good. I think it should be fine for tracking soft credits. However, one thing is missing:

I need to be able to set the 'Soft Credit To' field when importing contributions. I tested on the sandbox installation and I didn't see anything related to soft credits in the list of possible field mappings. I would think that a similar approach to importing the donor information would work: matching Contact ID, email address, or external identifier to the contact.

If the 'soft credit' field could be set when importing contributions, then I think that'd be everything I need. Let me know if there is any work that I can do to help get that into 2.2.