Name: Soft Credits and How to Best Give Credit to Your Influencers
Uploaded: 2026-09-23T18:31:26.444Z
Duration: 59 min 12 s
Description: Soft Credits and How to Best Give Credit to Your Influencers

Transcript for "Soft Credits and How to Best Give Credit to Your Influencers": Hello, friends. How are you doing today? Hopefully, everybody is enjoying their September, and, hopefully, it's starting to cool off where you are, here in here in, well, maybe not so sunny, Beech Grove, Indiana. It has finally started to cool off. It was exceptionally hot this weekend when I was trying to attend our town's fall festival. They say fall festival felt more like midsummer, fall or midsummer festival. But, as it is, welcome to this month's, webinar. And this month, I wanted to do a little bit more with something that's been kind of coming up in past webinars. Right? The the idea of, well, can we do something with, like, soft credits? What are soft credits? What how can they be utilized? And, you know, I thought, you know what? This might make for a really good, little webinar. Now it's very possible we won't spend the entire hour here, but I've got a few slides. And then I wanted to go into my, database to actually see if it is, you know, or to kind of see how these things can be kind of set up for you and, you know, and try to answer some questions. Of course, we still have our ask the expert next week. So hopefully, you know, hopefully, any outstanding questions or anything that comes up while you've been working within, your system for soft credits and so forth will be, you know, something that might you might bring to that ask the expert next next week. Haley, I see you're from Washington, DC. I don't know if you're much of a football fan, but I grew up a, Redskins and now a Commanders fan. And, I am devastated about what happened over this past weekend. I am so, so kinda you're kinda given up on, on football right now. So, I'm yeah. It is very sad. We were looking great right up until that moment. But, anyway, yes. So glad to see everybody saying hello, and, and welcome everybody. One of the things I do want to say real quick, and I may remind some folks, if they join in a little bit later, as I would love to hear as we kind of talk about soft credits and this kind of influence concept that is soft credits, how other people are utilizing that if you are utilizing them or if you've ever thought to utilize them. I'd love to hear what people think throughout the course of this webinar in the chat. Of course, I'll always be keeping an eye on that. But let's do the regular, kind of housekeeping business, here before we kind of get into to the, into the actual content itself. Of course, audio, video, everything broadcast through your computer. If you do end up with any kind of technical issues, just refresh your browser. At worst, you know, close your browser, reopen it, rejoin the session. It should pick right up, you know, right right back up live for you. This says use q and a to submit questions. Of course, you you guys always know to use the chat because I think it's always good to see, you know, for everybody to see what's being asked and what's kind of being, you know, chatted about back and forth. And then, of course, you can always adjust your settings you utilizing the little cog wheel on the screen, the little settings menu. And then, of course, please, if there is a survey, I I'm not always sure if we include a survey. But if there is a survey, please feel free to, you know, leave any kind of comments or feedback or anything like that. Of course, always welcome to leave your feedback, positive or negative, in the chat or the q and a. I'll be happy to to take a look at that as well. And, just know that this session here really did come from past questions, past conversations, and so forth. So, you know, it's a, it it's one of those kind of scenarios where I do want to make sure that, you know, when people when enough of a of a particular topic come up from people who are attending the webinars that I am able to, you know, really kind of, you know, plot something out. And and I think what I have kinda planned for the rest of the year, is kind of an, in indicator of some things that get asked about a lot and do get, you know, do lead to good conversations about how you might be able to utilize eTapestry in the various different nooks and crannies within the system, to your advantage. And, of course, since everybody's introducing themselves in the chat, you probably all know who I am by now. Jeff Arbuckle, almost twenty one years. I'm I'm the the weeks are counting down to my twenty first anniversary here at, Blackbaud. But, here in Beech Grove, like I said, it's it's about sixty sixty five, seventy degrees today. Finally, finally feeling my favorite time of the year of the fall. And, yes, I'm, I've got my best buddy Kirby right next to me. He's kinda been a little bit in my way leading up to this. So if he continues to kind of walk back and forth in front of me, I may put him on camera for you just to say hi to him. So, alright. So let's get into the conversation here about soft credits. And let's think about this, in the terms of credit and influence and how these terms could potentially apply to your various constituents. Right? Because, like, it's one thing for somebody to write a check, go online, make a donation, or whatever the case may be. Right? It's one thing to do that. But there are other circumstances, and there are other situations in which they're not making a physical contribution, but they've done something that feels like you should provide them with some sort of credit for another action that somebody else has taken. And there's lots of different ways that we can kind of think about this. Now if we think about influence, it really kinda breaks down into a couple of different ways. You know? I mean, like, you have your indirect influence. Right? Like, think of this like networking. You know, these are the people who are engaged in, you know, quote, unquote, true believers of your mission, and they will likely talk about your organization. They may even, provide kind of excitement for their friends and colleagues to kind of support you as well. And then, of course, you know, we we talk about the direct influence. This is the direct benefit you receive from the donor. I mean, no matter the size of the donation, a direct gift provides a direct line of influence from the donor. Right? Sometimes that influence is applied through the fund. Right? They say, I wanna make this contribution so that you can use it specifically for building repairs or or improvements or, buying books for, you know, for, children under the age of 10 to to have at the at the at the day care or at the at the center that you might be running or whatever. Those are things that are specific influences, those direct gifts that that they tell you how they want to be able to utilize that. Right? So logging this into eTapestry is really kind of up for each organization to kind of decide what's best and and the best place inside the database. Do you wanna include some way to show that a donor also contributed by way of his or her influence on other gifts and so forth? So let's turn that influence into credit. Right? And that's where we kind of get into the soft credit idea. Right? And that's the indirect credit. This is someone who supports your mission and asks for donations to be made to your org. You know, this leads to a potential influx of donations you did not have to solicit yourself. That would be, like, the indirect credit that they might have. You know, think about it like this. Every, every February or every mid January to mid February, I put up something on Facebook asking for people to make donations to the shelter where I've gotten my cats. And, you know, that is leading to an influx. The Southside Animal Shelter did not have to go out and do the work and and and, solicit themselves. And they are making this donation on my behalf for my birthday, which is in which is on February 11. So, you know, in a way, I am using my friend network, my the people that I that are closest to me that who know about, you know, how much I, you know, I love my cats and all of that stuff. They they are now making those donations on my behalf, which is kind of giving me some indirect influence and credit with the organization. Now, of course, the direct credit, much the same way as direct influence, this is the actual donation that's being made. You know, this is either the donor who asked for friends to make donate you know, makes make donations on their behalf, making his or her own donation or those, gifts that you receive at any point in time, you know, regardless if it's just, I'm gonna go online and make a $100 donation just because I, you know, I have the money to do that or I have the extra money that I wanna do something, you know, good for the organization that I appreciate the most. But how are these stored? Well, direct credits are simply the gift or transactions that you've entered into the journal of an account. You know, this could also be referred to in the system in various places, which we'll look at here in a moment, as hard credits. Now indirect credits are called soft credits within eTapestry, and these are not actual physical donations. They don't count towards received columns, like within the journal or if you just use received in a query or a report. And like I said, I'll talk a little bit more about how these are utilized. One other thing to point out, I think, and I think maybe now might be the, the the best case scenario to kinda talk about this is or the best situation to talk about this now. Soft credits and in kind donations are generally not the same thing. I'll talk a little bit more about that here in just a moment. But in kind donations, you have a physical thing that you get or you have some sort of physical action that happens. Right? It's something that's been donated to you to ultimately resell or something that's been donated to you, to utilize within your organization. Or it might be, you know, if you if you work with, like, like, there like an organization that maybe goes overseas to to to deliver health care to folks or something like that. A doctor may donate a week or a month or something out of his or her time to do that, and that could be considered an in kind donation. There are the occasional circumstance where these things might enter, you know, interlap, but they're not really meant to be the same thing. Soft credits are about influence, and in kind donations are about things other than money that get donated to the organization. And like I said, we'll talk a little bit more about that here in just a moment. But what are typical soft credit scenarios? Well, the first thing here listed is kind of where there's a little bit of overlap when it comes to an in kind donation versus a soft credit. Some organizations might look at an auction item and say, well, you know, if it's if it's a physical item that they've donated, we might provide them an in kind donation for that item. But when it sells, that donated item sells, we might actually apply a soft credit to that original donor for the sale price or the auction price, the winning bid of the person who made the donation to buy that item. So, you know, this is where you get a little bit of overlap where, you know, sometimes auction items or actual physical items might have a soft credit play involved in that. Right? So, like, I give, you know, I you know, speaking of Southside Animal Shelter, I give, a bunch of cat toys to, Southside Animal Shelter that they may, you know, they may look at that as an in kind donation of items that may end up being used in the in the cat room or may end up going home with, with an adopted cat or what have you. But, you know, if this was something where I say, okay. Well, they're gonna do a big fundraiser. I'm going to, donate an item that they can auction off. Well, at that point, I might get an in kind donation for the item that I gave, and then John Smith comes along, has the winning bid for whatever that item is. And when he makes his donation to purchase that item, then I might also get a soft credit showing that, oh, for whatever the cost was that this ended up being bid for, I get some, you know, I get some credit for that while not actually ever exchanging any kind of money with the organization, any kind of hard credit actual donation. Now another situation where you might see, this happen is like in workplace giving. Blackbaud will have, you know, a situation where they say, well, you can, you know, you can give a certain amount of money out of your paycheck to organizations that you might want to support. And what they will do is they they will provide one big payout. They're the ones who are actually making the payout to the organization. So it should be the hard credit should be placed under their account. But they also usually provide the people who made that contribution through them. Right? So they would say, okay. Well, you know, Jeff Arbuckle and so and so and so and so and such and such all made these donations there, and you can provide the soft credit to those people. Without them you know, they've made the they made a physical donation by way of that workplace giving, but you can still have that information within their account that is a soft that that's kinda put in there as a soft credit. Similar to that are third party networks. These are things like United Way or other, organizations that work with several nonprofits and, you know, give you kind of, like, a one stop shop to make a donation. Well, at the end of the day, if we use United Way as our example, United Way is the one who cuts the check. They handle a lot of the tax stuff on their end for the people who make the donations up through them, but they're the ones cutting the check to your organization. So the United Way would probably be where you place that hard credit. But you can put all the people who were involved in that donation into soft credits so that you still have the information about, oh, on this day and date, Jeff Arbuckle made a $200 donation that went through United Way. We received the check from United Way, and it's in the United Way account. But we also wanna be able to see if we go into Jeff's journal that, yeah, on, you know, September 23, he made a, he made that donation, and it gives you kind of the, that that that place where you can kind of see what that was done. Another example would be the peer to peer fundraising. This is very simple similar to the concept that I had about the, you know, going on Facebook and asking people to make a donation, you know, on behalf of me during that time leading up to my birthday to the Southside Animal Shelter. Well, they could apply me as a soft credit to all of those donations that they receive through that, networking. If you have something a little bit more specific like a five k or a golf outing and you have sponsors. Right? You have, like, the person's being sponsored by their friend group. You know, every mile will be a dollar or something like that from a donor. Well, you can still soft credit the participant for all of those donations that you received. And I'm gonna look over some of these, examples that have been put here in the chat here in just a moment. So, typically, the most common recipient of a soft credit would be an individual. They're rarely not to say that there isn't a circumstance where a business, a church, a foundation, or other entities might receive a soft credit, I while there are circumstances that could happen, it's rare that you would do that. Usually, individuals will receive a soft credit for the actions of other individuals or their business or, you know, you know, like, it was something that was a big church fundraiser or something, and then the the the church makes the donation, and all the individuals could have, you know, a soft credit or something like that. So, typically, these are going to be applied on individual accounts. Now here's an example. Right? So you have Sally Jones. You know, she's a donor and, you know, a a big fan of the Indianapolis Cat Society. Right? You know, she's donated multiple times over the years to the organization. She attends events, and she has become a fairly regular person to, you know, kinda come up in development meetings as a strong supporter of the organization. There's even a reason to think that she may someday become a board member. Right? Now she talks to Dave Smith, her coworker and somebody that she considers a friend outside of work. Sally and Dave have worked together for, you know, many years, and they consider each other pretty good friends. And sometimes, you know, they get together outside of work, like I said, and maybe sometimes with their spouses or or significant others and families or what have you. But Sally learns that day you know, learns that Dave and his fiance recently adopted a brand new kitten. So she decides to talk to him about the Indianapolis Cat Society and how much she loves their mission to find homes for the many homeless cats across Central Indiana. And so Dave thinks that this is a great organization too and then himself makes an a donation. So on the Indianapolis Cat Society side, after finding out that Dave made a donation after talking to Sally so, you know, they have a $500 donation from Dave, and this would be added to his account as a gift, which would then be the hard credit in this situation because he made the physical donation. But knowing that one of their most loyal supporters had a hand in Dave, her friend, and the brand new donor, they the society decides that Sally should be recognized in some way for that donation. So they attach her name to the donation and provide her a soft credit of $500. After all, Dave's $500 would not have been a reality without Sally's influence in this situation. So here we have you know, Sally's already a supporter. She has, you know, a friend that she kind of influences a donation for after kind of talking about how much she likes the organization. He makes that gift, and he's now listed inside of the database as a donor. But you don't wanna leave Sally completely and totally out of it, so you can apply a soft credit to that gift that ties back to her account. And when you look at her journal, you'll be able to see all of the physical gifts and those times that she influenced other gifts. I'll show that off here in just a moment. But, yeah, that's kind of the workflow that we would be working from, especially when we're dealing with, like, kind of that that kind of personal relationship, that personal influence that some of your donors may have. Now remember, soft credits aren't actual transactions. Right? They are kind of a ceremonial designation. They will not inappropriately change the actual received amounts, within accounts or under a received column within queries and reports. Now there is a way for you to see in a, you know, in a report, especially, to see, okay. Well, how much did this person actually physically give and how much were they self credited in one column, and you can also have them separated as well. But, it is like I said, it's a ceremonial designation to say, this person helped us obtain this gift from this other individual. Now before I get in to my database here, let me go over some of these other comments, from folks. Let's see here. Teresa, mentioned that I use soft credits for my board members when they sell tickets or if a person mentions them in a donation memo. Absolutely. That's another great example. Board members are are an excellent, an excellent source or an excellent place where you will often find soft credits. Because, again, board members, you often see, you know, that's influence. Right? That that's, like, absolutely, that's influence. Hayes mentions, let's see here. We use soft credits to mench to recognize donor advised fund donors, but we run into the problem of them not being, represented when we pull reports. And, yeah, we can talk about that a little bit more here in just a moment. There is a way that you'll be able to pull that information as well, And it's just a matter of, you know, either having the the query set up to be able to pull everybody that you want to see or have it set up to where the report can display the, you know, the the actual, soft credited person's name as well. Sue mentioned that we have a lot of donations from donor advised funds and need to soft credit donor and not just the foundation. Sometimes I need to also split the soft credit between, as it comes via a family fund that is at a foundation. So soft credit needs to go to, the family fund and the donor who controls the family fund. Yeah. And that could, yeah, that could actually, yeah, that could actually be a situation as well that you might need to sometimes do that kind of split. And sometimes, yeah, there could be a a soft credit that might have to go to a donor advised fund or a family foundation or something like that. Like I said, while it's typical that soft credits will appear in individual accounts and not typically in organization or foundation, that's not a hard line rule. There are always situations where you might have somebody, or you might have an organization or a donor advised fund or a family foundation or whatever ultimately get, soft credited. It depends on the circumstance. Right? Cindy mentioned so so we process United Way, donations as a straight credit to the actual donor and list, United Way as a UDF because, it is the donor's money, not United Way. And there were a couple of questions that that were kind of, attached to that as well. Do you do this for direct designations only, or do you also break out your annual allocation this way? What if you don't have the donor's contact information? Those are both good questions to kind of follow-up to that. And, Cindy, I I know other organizations that do things that way as well. I know at least in years past, oftentimes, United Way can also handle a lot of the, like, the tax, information they send out, you know, because they're getting donors, donating to them, and then they pass it along to to you. One of the main reasons why I've usually recommended that United Way, donations come in through, like, a United Way account and then soft credit the individuals is that oftentimes, United Way will take a slice of the of the, total amount that was donated for themselves. And then, like, you know, it's kinda like a a processing fee or a handling fee or whatever, and then they send you the remainder. Unless that is changed, the reason why I would say then go the other way is that, you know, United Way would be the total money that you received, and the soft credits can then be, you know, inflated to the proper amounts because the soft credit and the hard credit do not have to match on the same, know, the same amount on the same gift. But, you know, I mean, as long as, you know and and that's kind of one of those things about soft credits, in kind donations, and things like this. My recommendation would typically be that United Way would be the account and the actual individuals would be soft credited to that, where you can still, you know, have an account for the individual that you can reach out to. That's not to say that's the only correct way of doing it as well. I guess I I should give that disclaimer, as well. So that's okay. Betty, excellent question. Is there a way to apply two soft credits to one donation? Yes. And I will show you how to do that here in just a moment. Yes. Hey. Yeah. I can understand that. You know, credit queries and soft credits can or queries and reports can sometimes not be as friendly to people. We've used soft credits for employee, matching. That's another excellent example there, Wayne. Record the matching gift under for under the employer, add soft credit to the employee's account. Absolutely. Elizabeth asks, if you give a hard credit in ETAP, are you able to make a note in that same transaction of the soft credit to apply it to the other donor, and is it done automatically? Yes. I'll show you that here in just a moment, as well. Michelle, we do the same and handle the fees in our accounting software and give the full hard credit in etap to the donor. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's fine. I mean, Michelle, that's that's quite alright. Like I said, you know, my recommendation would typically go with whoever cut the check would be the hard credit, but not to say that that's the only correct way of of doing that. So, Michelle, I think you and Cindy are kind of doing the same thing, and that's that's okay. You know, as long as you're able to appropriately know what was received and where, you know, and and who sent it to you and where, you know, and where you're applying that credit, as long as it's consistent, that's the thing that really ultimately matters the most, honestly. Alright. So let me stop sharing these slides, and I'll get into the database. And I think that will, answer some of the questions that are out there as well. So just one moment here. Let me make sure I'm doing the right screen, and I'm sharing everything on that screen. Should be coming up here now. Okay. So multiple scenarios that we could look at, but they all operate effectively the same way. Right? So let's say, let's say ABC organization is making a donation because I gave to them through a, you know, like a workplace giving situation. They kinda collect all the money and then they send it over. Right? So you would come into the journal here, and you would say, okay. We're gonna add a gift to this account. And let's say it is a $150 gift. It's gonna go to the general operating fund. A lot of this is not really gonna matter. What I select here is gonna matter more appropriately when you receive donations. So, I'm just gonna select a couple of things here. Now you received this check here. Okay. Now when you are building or when you're creating a gift and you're saving it, and you've done all the normal stuff that you would for a gift, right here on the spot, you can go to this, panel here that says tribute, soft credit, matching gift relationships. And here under the section for soft credit information, I can search for an account. I'm gonna select my name here. And then you can also put in the exact amount that you want to credit. Right? So in this case, it's a $150 because that's how much, you know, that's how much I gave to the employee giving fund, and the employee giving fund sent it out to the organization. So here, now when I save this so let's save and go to journal. Couple of things that you're gonna see here. For one, here's our gift from the ABC organization side of things. If we click on this gift, you will see a little asterisk next to the Tribute soft credit matching gift. And we click here, and we can see, okay. Jeff is attached here. But, automatically, if we go to my account and I go to the journal, soft credit. Now you'll see here under original account, a b c organization. They made the original transaction. Right? Now I have a soft credit. It is now listed here, $150, and it shows all of the information about, like, the general operating fund as well. And you'll notice here under received, no received dollars. You should be able to add you can add a column here that says soft credit amount. And you'll see here, and I can even pull this over to receive. And now you'll see the soft credit appears underneath the soft credit amount, not under received because I didn't actually give any money. This was just received by the, you know, by the ABC organization. K? So that's one way of doing a a soft credit that attaches an account directly to the gift. Right? And then it shows up in their journal as well. Now to answer the question of can you do multiple soft credits within an account, and the answer to that is yes. And how to do that is if I go in here to ABC organization again, and I go into the journal. And for the transaction, instead of doing a gift pledge, I'm gonna do a split transaction. I'm gonna say there are, let's say there are two segments here. The grand total is $300. I'm gonna click add segments. And we'll do the gift here. The check here again was on 09/23. It's 1235 is the check number. And for segment number one, I am going to put in the received amount of $150. Oh, yes, Twila. Yes. I always forget to mention this at the front. This is being recorded. So, yes, you can absolutely, review the recording. Typically, not long after the session, you should be able to just go back in through the same link that you used to get into the session and view the recording, but a link will be sent out twenty four hours after the end of the session. So you'll be able to review anything that we've that we've done here. And especially for anybody who has to leave early or gets called away, you can always you you can always count on a re on a, recording, which I guess this gives me now a chance to plug the opportunity to say, anytime that you want to view one of these webinars, if you sign up for a webinar not even knowing if you can attend or not, don't worry about it because you'll still get a recording even if you don't attend. So, absolutely, those recordings will be made available to you. Okay. So in this one, we got general operating. We got capital campaign. And then over here, we can say for this $150, we are going to put John Smith for a $150 to this segment. Right? Then we come down here. We've got segment number two, and it still tells you what you can still fill into the received amount here, what's left over. So I can say $1.50. We're gonna say general operating and capital campaign. The gift type is going to be the same as the, gift type that was filled out here. We don't have to do anything there, but you can click on tribute, soft credit, matching gift. And this time, I'm going to, Angela Adams is going to be the recipient, or is going to be the soft credit for the second segment. And now when we do save and go to journal oh, yes, Betty. I can do that here in just a moment. You'll see here now, instead of just a regular gift, this is still a gift, but it's it's now called a split transaction, meaning there were multiple segments and you can have many multiple segments. So, like, let's say you get a, a big check that you have to soft credit 10 people. Well, when you do add and split transaction, you can then say, I want 10 segments, and here's the grand total. And you go through each segment, and you apply the soft credit person there. Each segment will look like a gift screen. It's just it's a segment as part of a larger transaction. And if we go into, let's see here. I think it was John Smith and, Angela Adams, I believe, is who we have there. So if we go into John Smith's account now I hope I selected the right yes. So here we go. You have his soft credit. Now this does not say that this is part of a split transaction. It doesn't have to because the because John is the recipient of a soft credit from an ABC organization donation, and it still gives the same information. And if you have included the soft credit amount column here, it will show that, and the same will show for Angela Adams. Go into journal, and you'll see her soft credit. So split transactions will be your best friend in any situation where you receive one big lump sum and you got a bunch of people to soft credit from it. And then you can apply whatever soft credit amount you want. Betty, to show you how I added that, what I did was I clicked on this little button here. It looks like three little columns, And I just scrolled down to the s's, and I checked soft credit amount, and I clicked apply changes. Now what it will do is it will first put it all the way over here to the right, and you can always click and drag these into whichever order you want. Is there a way to include it on imports and uploads? Michelle, yes. And, actually, I believe in the docs section, there is a, resource there for you to say how to import account information, with a gift and a soft credit. And it should also include a should also include a, a a, template for you to utilize in there as well. Alright. So one other thing to consider as well about this. Right? So let's say let's go back to ABC organization here. Let's say that this is a situation where, for whatever reason, there are fees that are taken out or some sort of deduction from the total amount. Right? If you go into the journal and you say, I'm going to put in a gift here that's, let's say, $486.30. Right? But it was from a $500 donation that I made for that transaction. I can come in here and let me just select everything here again. This time, I'm gonna put it in as cash just to to skip that whole step of having to put in all that extra information there. But for here, there's nothing wrong with me putting in a higher amount on the soft credit. That is okay. That's where you get into those situations where if there's any kind of processing fees or any kind of handling fees that might come from a third party or from a from a, you know, like a workplace giving or something like that, some sort of, you know, administrative fee or whatever. But I still made the $500 donation. You still wanna soft credit me that $500 donation, you can put that in there like this, even though it is more than the actual received amount. And you see it saves it without giving me any kind of warning or anything that says, nope. It can't be, you know, it cannot be a higher amount than the other. Sometimes even, you might say, okay. Well, we have a $500 donation, but, really, we're just going to give Jeff credit for half of that $500 because, originally, they're gonna make a $250 donation, and Jeff, the board member, convinced them to make a $500 donation. You can say, well, Jeff should get soft credited for the extra amount that they weren't going to give. So you can do that too. It can be a different amount in there. It does not have to be the same amount. I would recommend, though, if you are going to put any kind of soft credit attached directly to the gift, while the amount field is not required, I would highly recommend that you do utilize the amount field because that gives you that information on the other side of the gift. Right. Or the other side, the other person. Their soft credit would have an amount attached to it. Now couple of things here real quick that I also wanna talk about is that you can also, from the add button over here, you can select just to create a soft credit. Maybe you've put in a gift in the past and you later found out that, oh, he was part of a, a bunch of these donations. I'm not gonna go back through and add him to each individual transaction. I'm just gonna come in here and give him one lump sum, soft credit. You can do that as well. So it kinda depends on the situation. Typically, if you know with the gift that you're entering that somebody had some credit that should be applied to that, you can do that right there on the spot. Otherwise, you can always go back later and give him, you know, or him or her a large lump sum, you know, soft credit if you need to. When it comes to queries and reports, and I think this will be something that we'll probably dig into a little bit more, with next week's Ask the Expert. But, there are a couple of ways that we can kinda query a report to to make sure that we are pulling in soft credit information as well as their actual physical, donations as well. Oh, Hayes had a question here. How do organizations accurately report lifetime giving for donor advised fund donors when the gifts are legally from a community foundation and the individual donors are tracked via soft credits, particularly when soft credit filters aren't available in reporting. So they can be, they can be made available in reporting. They may not there there are some options, I believe, with the summary fields as well, but I'll I'll show you here in just a moment, Hayes. So in the query side of things, if we wanted to build a query that said, okay. I wanna make sure that soft credits are also pulled in here. I'm not gonna include them as part of the received part of it, but I at least wanna have a report to say, here is the actual physical donations and the actual you know, all the influence that we might have had from somebody so that we can show that alongside their received amount. There are a few different ways that you can query on this. We're gonna call this soft credit query. We're gonna use base all constituents as our starting query, and we're going to utilize, data return type of journal entries in this case. And we're gonna go into we have a couple of different ways that we could do this. One, we could say, okay. Well, here are the journal entry types, and we can say, I want to include recurring gifts. I want to include gifts, payments. And then I also want to include, you can either do soft credit or soft credit without hard link. Depending on the circumstance, you may have to choose soft credit without hard link. That is if you specifically just want to see soft credit information. Because if you if you created a query and you were only looking at soft credits and you chose soft credit, it would show you the soft credit and its linked hard credit. So if you just wanted to see soft credit information only, you know, completely and totally divorced from whatever it might be attached to, you would use soft credit without hard link. But it can be used here to say, okay. We're gonna get recurring gifts, gifts, payments, and the soft credit without hard link, and we're gonna find this for, everybody who gave, let's say, this week. K? When I preview this, we should see those gifts and those soft credits that I entered today. Oh. I already had used soft credit query as a name of a query. So let me just add in that. And now when I preview see here all of these from today, It's got the ABC organization. There there's gift segment here, but also their individual gifts and then the attached soft credit in that you know, all in the same thing here. Now, again, much like with your query layout, you you do have this option here to include an additional column if you would like, and you can include the soft credit information here in the query preview. But where do I add that here? Ah, there it is. Soft credit amount. I must have just skipped it last time. And you see it's here, and I'm gonna move it over here next to received. Right? Now this can also be done within a report. If I go into a report and I'm gonna say re there are multiple different ways that you could do this. Now I'm gonna group this report by account, and I'm gonna show group totals here just to make this a little bit easier to read. But we could have account name. We could put in date. We'll put in received. Under, journal fields, we can come down here and you can also pull in things like, you know, soft credit amount can be pulled in. You can also put in, up here in the l's, you can say linked soft credit account name, and you can also do linked hard credit account name. And now let's save and run. I'm gonna choose the query that I just created. And when I display the results on screen here, you should see ABC organization. Here's all of their gifts. Right? Because it shows up under received. Right? Zeros for soft credit amount because they didn't have a soft credit amount. They had actual gifts. And then you see the linked soft credit account names for each of these gifts. And then if you look at these individuals, you see soft credit information. And over here, you have the linked hard credit name. So there are additional information there that you can pull into that. And, you know, when it comes to, like, lifetime now another thing you could do here let's see here. Let's go back into our report. Another field that you could potentially use under those, journal fields is down here you see received and soft credit. If you choose this, then what's gonna show up for people is a combined total of what their received amount is and what their soft credit amount is as one total. Typically, you're not gonna use that for any kind of official work with, like, here's what your, you know, your tax deductible amount is or anything like that. But internally, that received and soft credit can display both of that information that you, you know, into 1 grand total to show the total influence that somebody may have had, at your organization. Does that give you a little bit of of extra, clues there in context, Hayes, for for what you might wanna do? Oh, yes. Yeah. So as far as the linked information, there are, you know, a linked soft credit full address. There's, you know, linked soft credit, you know, phone number. So you can pull some of that information as well with the with the linked, the linked soft credit fields that are under journal or under, yeah, the journal fields. Priscilla, the, the data return type for the query is journal entries. Yeah. I'll show you the the the query again here in just a moment. Betty, how would you differentiate a soft credit where it's an where it's an actual donor or if it's a solicitor, a person who helped bring in the donation? When I run a query for total donations made over a year, for exam for something like that, you would if if you're just looking at a list of of transactions and you're trying to figure out, it's like, okay. What is this soft credit person? Are they a solicitor? Are they a board member? Whatever. That's gonna be handled with your, user defined fields. I would put that into a query or I'm sorry. I would put that into the report, not the query itself. So with the report, you could say, well, I wanna, you know, be able to use some of my user defined fields to say, okay. This person who is, you know, this this person who has the soft credit on their account is this type of of person. So, I think, Betty, that might be something where we would probably have to look a little bit more deeply into into just how things are entered to try to figure out the exact answer to that question. But through some sort of whether it's going to be through a, through a query criteria or through a report column, we should be able to figure out that, you know, figure out some way to be able to display that. Now to show that query again here before we kinda wrap things up for this week, let me go over here. It's this query here under recently viewed. So I named it you know, you can name it whatever you need to. The starting query, I just left as base all constituents because we're gonna be looking into the constituents in the database to find this information. Data return type, I select the journal entry so that I could actually see the received amount, soft credit amount, all of that stuff. That would come from the journal entry side of things. My criteria options this is just gonna be the default of of match all criteria. And then I utilized here this, journal entry types to be able to check off the exact types of entries I want. And I use journal entry date just to to kind of frame it in based on what I knew I just entered today, but you can put in any date range that you want, or you can leave that off totally and get a a grand, you know, all of history list. Another way that you could potentially query on soft credit information is, you have this individual transaction soft credit. This works just like individual transaction received. If you just wanna know the soft credit information, you can put this in and you can say greater than or equal to a dollar or whatever. Priscilla, as far as, you know, kind of showing that inflated because both soft credits and, hard credits are included. My suspicion is is that, as long as soft credits aren't being put in as actual gifts, what you would do here is, what my guess is is that it's possible that the report field oops. I did not mean to actually run the results. I just wanted to look at this side. It is entirely possible that the journal field here is, utilizing, this received and soft credit, option. That would combine everything and could potentially inflate things. So it kinda depends on how the information has been entered in. That would be something that, support should be able to take a look at and and kinda troubleshoot the exact column there. Actually, Laurie, one of the, docs one of the links that are in the docs there is, we'll we'll give you those links, or give I'm sorry. Give you those steps. So look in the docs section there, and that should give you the, there's a bunch of different, knowledge based articles with steps on how to do various different types of queries and reports with soft credits. So that, very similar to what I just showed, same process or same concept there. Also, anything that has the, links, the links to the docs will always be part of the recording. So they should or, you know, all of that stuff under that section there, it starts with what is a soft credit, and then it has, like, some how do I, how do I report on soft credits and amounts and stuff like that. Those are always available to you whenever you look at the recording or and, you know, there's they're available for you to, to bookmark as well. You can click on them and start, bookmarking them as well. So, yeah, they they don't get sent as a separate email, but they are attached to the to the session. So if you need to go back into the session to get those links, they're they're there. They'll be available to you. Alright. Now next week, is the ask the expert, and, I'll be happy to go over any more of this as we need to, and, provide you any additional, information and, and so forth. I guess before I pull up the slides again, as promised, I I can bring my little buddy Kirby over. He's been good. He's been sleeping right next to me the whole time. So, let me, just share this, this last slide. You know, of course, please feel free to, utilize the, you know, the various resources that are also available to you in general. These are all found within eTapestry. The Blackbaud community is about to get a refresh, so, definitely, looking to have a lot more information in there and a lot more, you know, a lot more things for you to be able to interact with, and be able to, you know, to to pick up that additional information from. Of course, you you know, customer support is a great place to troubleshoot any issues. Knowledge base is a great place to find a lot of documents with step by step instructions for various queries, reports, and what have you. But no. Thank you so much, and, thank you for all of the questions. Anything that you want to bring to the, ask the expert about this topic next week, please feel free to. There may even be time to handle some other, types of, of questions as well. So, you know, I look forward to seeing, whoever can attend next week. And, yeah. Until then, hope you enjoy the rest of your day, and you enjoy your, and I did see a couple of folks say that it is starting to cool down. So, hopefully, you're starting to enjoy the fall season as we kinda move into, like I said, my favorite time of the year. Next month is my very favorite month of the year because of spooky season. So I hope everybody is, looking forward to, to the fall, and everybody's having a great end of September as well. And I look forward to seeing everybody next week. Thank you so much.