Melissa, I feel your pain. This has been a big problem for me too, not just with new donors but with all sorts of reporting trying to separate Donor Advised Fund Soft Credits from Spouse Soft Credits. What I'm considering as a work-around is to always create a pledge on the individual's record for any gift received from a DAF.

Here's the plan:
When looking at any giving history we only look at Cash, Pledge, etc. (not pledge payments) which follows best practices for accounting. Even if I get a straight Cash gift from the DAF (no pledge involved), I enter a new pledge on the Individual's record and then pay that pledge immediately from the gift on the DAF record. When I run reports I'm only looking at the Pledge on the Individual's record and completely ignore any Pledge Payments or Soft Credits.

This is still just a working theory. Haven't actually implemented this yet and may require going back a few years to add pledges on those Individual records and pay them off from the DAF. Aside from the general hassel and innacuracy of recording a pledge when there really wasn't one (maybe track this as a Gift Subtype?), I need to work this out with our accounting folks so that we still reconcile with their A/R and balance sheet.

Could this work? Or have I missed something?

I think that there are financial implications for recording pledges when there really was no pledge. I do not think I would advocate for this since it could look like you were illegally paying a pledge with a DAF gift which is disallowed by the IRS.

Anyway I am not sure it would work the way you think. I presume you would enter a pledge on John Smith's record and soft credit Sally Smith. When you applied the gift on the John and Sally Smith DAF to the pledge on John Smith's record it would automatically add a SC to Sally's record but nothing to John's. So you would still be monkeying around trying with each gift to get John to appear on reports properly.

Now I am dealing with this on a whole other level. Trying to get a special query of donors but need to exclude board members. Because we need to include SCs the board member's spouses are now in my query and should not be. I do not have a special constituent code for BM spouses (and now thinking I may need to). You can query on primary constituency but not spouse primary constituency. I need that too!

AMEN AMEN AMEN!! Soft credits make me crazy, exactly for the reasons you stated. Here is my reporting scenario:

- Donor A makes a gift through his donor-advised fund. We hard credit the donor-advised fund (or its sponsoring foundation), and soft credit the donor. The donor wants recognition to go to himself (the soft credit recipient), so we should check “soft credit gifts to recipient.”
- Donor B makes a gift through his company. We hard credit the company, and soft credit the donor. The donor wants recognition to go to his company (the hard donor), so we should check “soft credit gifts to donor.”
- Donor C makes a gift. We hard credit the donor (head-of-household) and soft credit the spouse. The donor wants recognition to go to both of them, so we should check “soft credit gifts to donor.”
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Now tell me how I'm supposed to pull an accurate listing/report. I feel like I'm "winging it" every time. !!

Oh yeh, and throw in Foundations and how THOSE gifts are soft-credited and reporting. More crazy.

Melissa, I added Constituent Code "Trustee Spouse" for exactly the same reason. Works well.

We're also having difficutly with hard credit donor getting soft credit because the wife paid the husbands pledge.

Jenn - Please be sure to take a look at the way householding is done in eTapestry if you are not familiar with it. I am signing up now to do discovery!

thank you Melissa, I was about to email you directly :)

I want to be able to globally change the automatic setting for soft crediting enties between spouses.
The current setting of defaulting to always soft crediting causes many problems - and it is just a nuisance.

Hi Jenn, I would absolutely love to discuss this further as the whole soft credit/"householding" issue in RE continue to cause us reporting headaches, especially when both husband and wife need to be soft-credited for a gift from a DAF. Are you all still working on this?

Something else I would like thrown in to the mix . . .

We have someone who gave via Fidelity and was soft credited. Our gift processor thought that his wife would automatically be soft credited, but obviously she was not. They also have a family foundation and none of those gifts were soft-credited to her either. They are understanding, but this resulted in her getting a solicitation email that she should not have received.

So if there could possibly be a setting to soft-credit the spouse when the other spouse receives soft credit, that would be be helpful. Obviously,this should be something that each organization could turn on or off, as they see fit.

I might not be thinking this all the way through in terms of the complete impact, but that is what discussion and discovery is for!