Name: Ask the Expert about Soft Credits and How to Best Give Credit to Your Influencers
Uploaded: 2026-09-30T18:31:23.721Z
Duration: 56 min 44 s
Description: Ask the Expert about Soft Credits and How to Best Give Credit to Your Influencers

Transcript for "Ask the Expert about Soft Credits and How to Best Give Credit to Your Influencers": Hello, everybody. Welcome to, this Ask the Expert session. Also, hope everyone is having a good final day of, of September, as I like to call it, spooky season eve, as we get ready for October, my favorite month of the year. And, hope everybody is having a good end of, what is actually, I guess, also the end of the third quarter of twenty twenty six. Seems like just yesterday, we were ringing 2026 in, and now we're about to see it go out. But, no. Thank you everybody for attending and, and showing up here today. I know that there may be some kind of leftover questions or some things that might be, taken into consideration as we kinda talked about last week with the, soft credits. Maybe there might be some questions regarding how things are are kind of reported on or how things are are displayed. More than happy to, to really kind of, you know, talk over that with everybody. Please feel free to utilize chat to, to ask any of your questions or introduce yourself. As always, I see Cindy here. It's always great to see you here. Cindy, I hope you're having a good September 30 as well. So, yeah. So just kind of, you know, do let me see here. I should have already put my hang on just one quick second here. I think I already have got my there we go. We should be inside my database now. And, yeah. So just to you know, one of the things that I think I was kind of getting at right at the very end of last week's session, again, is to kind of reiterate a couple of quick things about how these, types of entries are put in. One of the things I don't think I really necessarily went over, a great deal was the, you know, just adding a soft credit to an account without it being attached directly to a gift. That is always possible. I know there are times where people may, you know, kind of look back through, you know, through the, you know, through the course of a year or, you know, maybe maybe even a little bit longer, and they're saying, you know, I really probably should, give this person maybe some sort of a soft credit or some sort of additional, credit outside of what they actually donate and make, you know, make donations toward. I think, you know, the there are instances where people may be retroactively provide some soft credit to folks, and that is just as simple as going into the ad, clicking on soft credit. One of the things that you'll see is that it's it's very straightforward. It's basically asking you what the date of that soft credit's gonna be, the amount, and then you're adding in the fun campaign approach, all of that sort of stuff. Now, again, remember, this amount is the soft credit amount. It's not applying any kind of physical received donation. So, you know, again, this is still just counting as a soft credit. And if I were to put in something here, we will see excuse me. Let's see here. When I save this and I go into the journal, one of the things that you'll see here is now this is just listed as a soft credit just like these others. The only difference is is that, you know, these two here have an original account of that ABC organization where I had the gift, and then I I tied a soft credit to that gift, but it's still listed as a soft credit. It still is not showing anything for received, and it's just adding on to the soft credit amount on the account. Molly, I did see that, that you, missed last week's session. I can make sure while I'm thinking about it here. I was actually thinking about putting this into the chat. Let me get the where is my link for Here we go. Let me put this over here into the chat as well because this is, you know, this, landing page for all of the events should have a on demand event, down at the bottom of the page that should include last week's soft credit session. And, of course, the soft credit session there, will also include any, you know, any of the resources and stuff that I included into the session. It should be the very first. Let me put this over into the chat for everybody. But that page there, that's where you, of course, where you go to sign up for any sessions and so forth. But if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you'll see on demand sessions. The very first panel should be your the one from last week. So, Molly, if you wanna check that out at your, at your convenience, that's great. But I'm also more than happy to, the, you know, I'm also more than happy to answer any questions that you have as well. Let's see. Mary Catherine asked, is there a way to attach one of these manual soft credits to another account? So, yeah, I mean, any one of these manual soft credits like this, at at any point in time, you can add them to any any type of account. As long as it's a constituent, it does not matter which account that you go to. It will be made available, for, you know, for you to add to any journal page. So as long as it's a constituent account, you should have the ability to add in a soft credit under any account. So, the only thing is is that, when it comes to actually creating the soft credit, you just have to be in the account that you want the soft credit to appear on. Does that help, Mary Catherine? And if I maybe, misunderstood the question, you can always let me know that too. Oh, Priscilla has an excellent question here. I will answer here in just a moment. And also, okay. Great. Great, Mary Catherine. As far as any other of those questions, Molly, that you have, feel free to start putting them in there. I mean, some of it may be part of the last week's session, but at the same time, I'm more than happy to answer whatever questions that you have. Priscilla asks, what are best practices regarding donations received from donor advised funds, IRAs, etcetera? So this is this is something that I think comes up a lot. And while I'm going to give what I would consider to be the, quote, unquote, best practice based on what we would say here from a Blackbaud standpoint, from a database standpoint, Understand that there may be a few folks that attend the webinar and might might have their own, you know, their own steps that they follow as well. That may have a slightly different perspective on this. The key thing, regardless if you follow my advice or if you have your own, process that you follow, the main thing that you always wanna keep in mind and the one thing that I will always say will be the number one best practice is be consistent. As long as you're consistent, whether you follow the advice I'm about to give or some other, process, it it's okay. Now what I would say in terms of my stated best practices, and I think what would probably be also considered maybe the the standard that Blackbaud would would provide across any of their, your products, The best practice that I would say is when it comes specifically, anytime you are receiving a gift that is from what I would call a third party, whether it's a donor advised fund or a, you know, someplace like United Way or, like maybe ABC organization has collected a bunch of donations from their employees, and they're gonna send one big check. The the the best practice that I have for you is that whatever or however you receive the physical donation, whether it's from an individual or it's from a, donor advised fund or it's from an employee, an employer rather that's collected a bunch of employee donations or if it's United Way or whatever, that physical donation would typically be entered into the account of the organ of the, of the donor that made the physical donation. If ABC organization collected a bunch of employee gifts, sent one check to my organization, I'm going to put in ABC organization as the person who made the donation. So they would receive the gift. Now if I receive from that a list of all of those employees and what their individual transaction was, And sometimes you see this from, you know, various other circumstances. And if you're dealing with a donor advised fund, you're also often dealing with, like, maybe a family or an individual that's making a family donation through the donor advised fund. That's where you can get into you know, you add a gift, you put in the person who's going to be the soft credit. Right? That's, you know, whoever the individual is that that made up that donor advised fund decision, The donor advised fund makes the donation. You put in the physical gift under their account. You add, you know, the family or the or, you know, the person who's kind of in charge of the estate. If you have an individual constituent account for them, you would add them as the soft credit. If it is a situation where, like I said, ABC organization collected a bunch of donations from all of their, employees and they send you a lump sum check and then they say, here are the employees and their individual contributions. What you can do is you can come in here and you can say, split transaction. You put in the entirety of the, you know, received amount. Let's say five employees gave $20 each. So you put that in under received as the total. You put in five segments, and then you can put under each individual segment the $20 and who it was that you're going to soft credit that for, and then it would just you know, the the gift would be going into the into the account that actually made the physical donation. So, hopefully, Priscilla, that kind of helps kind of describe what I would say the the best practice is. The person who cut the check, sent the donation, made you know, whatever whatever, you know, whether it's a a credit card donation or a physical check or whatever, whoever sent that gets the hard credit, And then anybody else that you want to attach to that as an individual, that might have some influence or what have you on that transaction, you can always add them as a soft credit. Doesn't it doesn't make a difference that eTapstreet is not integrated into our accounting processes. So what we do with the database does not affect our accounting. We want to ensure appropriate communication with donors, not foundations, etcetera. So that's okay too. Like I said, you know, there are other folks who may say, well, what we really wanna do is, you know, we keep track of the actual physical, you know, all of the tax sort of stuff that might go into that on, you know, say, like QuickBooks or something like that. And what we wanna do inside of eTapestry is make sure that, you know, we can have communications that's going, you know, to say thank you to the individual, not necessarily to the foundation, the organization, the company, you know, whatever the the situation is. That's okay too. One thing I would say though is that if you are putting in these soft credits, I mean, it is still possible to say, okay. Well, now I wanna take a look at all the people who I entered a soft credit for because they're you know, like, if I you know, I have these soft credits in my account here. It is entirely possible for you to query on getting these, you know, these entries here where I am listed as the soft credit and creating a a a thank you letter from the soft credit amount, not from the received amount. So, you know, while it is entirely possible for you to say, you know what? I'm just going to put in the contribution into the person's name even if a third party actually made the the physical donation. That's okay, but remember that, you know, technically, at that point in time, you would wanna make sure that everything is getting not only acknowledged correctly, but also for tax purposes that things are being appropriately, handled in that way as well. And, again, consistency is going to be the main you know, the the main goal is to always be consistent so that when you're able to pull the information, if you're pulling it the way you need it, as long as it's consistent, that is all that really matters. But if you put in soft credits, there is still a possibility to be able to say, oh, thank you, Jeff, for, you know, all of your soft credits and, you know, for all of your, contributions to our you know, that that would, you know, would come with a, you know, nondeductible value of, you know, $750 for September. That's entirely possible. You could do that. Right. So the IRA would be you're right. That and Cindy is exactly right. That is a, you know, that's going to still be a, a a a tax deduct a deductible amount. And, you know, when you're dealing with something like from an IRA or something like that, you know, of course, you can always when you're creating a gift, a few things to take into mind is that, you know, some of these different types of gift types might actually apply in different ways. So this kinda goes beyond IRA slash, you know, IRA slash, donor advised fund slash, you know, you know, whatever. Like, if if you receive something like a a, stock, you know, like, or you receive some real estate, you can enter that in as the exact gift type as well. So that would be something that I would certainly, you know, take into consideration as well. And, of course, you always have the ability to add additional user defined fields to be able to say, this came from a donor advised fund or this came from, you know, a a, IRA account or this came from, you know, whatever, you know, whatever the source is, you would always have the ability to add additional user defined fields into gift pages as well. So you can really kinda help differentiate some of that stuff. I'm just kinda going back up through here. I see, Molly has some questions here that, I was gonna get to here. If the spouse and a couple who normally is given the hard credit dies and the surviving spouse has always just given soft credits, how do we ensure that the surviving spouse isn't considered a new donor once they start giving on their own? So one of the things you can do here, Molly, is whenever you have a situation like that where you say, okay. Well, we wanna make sure that the, you know, that the transactions are, you know, kinda going into the proper account. One thing you could do is if they are set up as a household, what you can do is you can now make the surviving spouse the head of household. There would be ways that in a report or with a query, you can pull, you know, like, the head of household information instead of just the individual accounts. That might help. Another thing you could potentially do is on any of the saved accounts or, you know, maybe just as the account as a whole, one of the things you could potentially do is you could merge the two accounts into one, which would then move those journal transactions over. And you could have, like, a note or something that that would describe, like, well, we moved this over because, you know, John Smith passed away and Jane Smith is now taking over in donations and all of that sort of stuff. You could have a note like that, but you can also as you go into, you know, like, if you wanted to, you can always move individual transactions from one account to another. So that's something else that you could potentially do as well. I think it will really kinda depend on how vast the history is. There's a part of me that would say, well, if we're going to know that if we know that you know, we have John and Jane Smith. John passed away. Jane is still, you know, alive and is still going to continue making donations. What I would probably do is I and I I sometimes hate recommending this because I know sometimes it it kinda comes off as a little bit cold, But I would probably merge John's account into Jane's and then have some place either as a journal entry note where you can add just like a note that mentions that you merged, you know, two accounts because John passed away or whatever. And you can also, from the persona page of Jane's account, have, you know, one of these sticky notes where you can say you know, where it will show up on the account as you move around in the account that, you know, that that Jane is, you know, Jane is now the the widowed spouse of John Smith who passed away on whatever day. So there would be ways that you would be able to to mark that. And the other thing that that helps do, is it helps prevent any kind of mistake where ultimately the deceased person's name ends up on any kind of communications or any kind of, you know, anything like that. I would probably go the route of as cold as it may seem, especially with somebody that you may have a lot of, you know, like, a a long relationship with, I would probably merge that person's account into their spouse's and let the spouse just kind of have all of the history. And at that point, the spouse won't show up as a new donor when they start making their donations. Hopefully, that, makes, makes sense there for you. When a donor couple signs up for recurring donations, is it possible to set the spouse to automatically receive a soft credit? Unfortunately, no. There isn't a way to do that right now, Molly. Unfortunately, those transactions are just going to kinda come in as the recurring gifts for that schedule. So, yeah, unfortunately, there's not a way to to do it that way. So, Molly, as far as, like yeah. If you do merge the two, if you do merge the two, the two accounts, it is possible that you could lose some of that user defined field history, because if you say, okay. I want this to just kinda merge over into the person's you know, into the other account. That is one of the dangers that could come up is that, yeah, if there's you know, if it doesn't if it's going into an account that has other demark demarcations for that, you would end up ultimately losing that. So in that regard, if I were still going to do the merge, I would probably try to, record as much information as I possibly can before doing the merge and then including that as part of that note or as part of that, information. It it gets a little tricky only because, you know, at some and, you know, I know that Cindy definitely recommends doing the, in the relationship tab, you know, kind of having that that, that household setup. I don't necessarily disagree with that either. Like I said, I you know, with the way I would do things, like I said, does kinda does go more the direction of the merge, but that's not necessarily you know, that would just be how I would deal with it with you know, by way of you know, eventually, that account is not gonna, unfortunately, is not gonna really serve much more of a purpose at some point. But, you know, at that point, then you that becomes a whenever you're ready to kind of clean up that, that account may end up getting merged or deleted anyway. So, you're right. So in one regard, like I said, you know, you can do the merge. In the other hand, you could do a, a, a change in the household relationship, making the survivor the primary, that allows for you to still have all of the user defined fields, all of that account history. The day may come where you may say, you know what? This person has been passed away now for ten years. There's no real point in having that account still in the database. I can now merge it with the survivor. Both options may end up playing out down the line. Anyway, you may start with the with the household demarcation and then later decide, okay. Enough time has passed. We can, you know, we can merge the account and, you know, and and still have all of that historical data as far as they're giving. Hopefully, that that helps you out there, Molly. It's it's a little bit when I make a recommendation like that, understand that I'm only making a recommendation based on how I would potentially utilize the database. That's not always going to be the best option for each individual, donor and database. So that's, it's you know, you may decide, oh, I like this other idea a little bit more, but, you know, I wanna try to present, multiple ideas. Let's see. I did have a couple of questions over on the q and a side here. Let me take a look here and see. Let's see. Amber asked, we have a big master customer report created to compare donors' giving trends year over year. Our CEO wants to see both the hard and the soft credit giving on the report and needs a way to sort the gifts in a clean way so that the totals aren't inflated. We find this very difficult since some donors give both soft and hard credits, gifts through DAFs and direct gifts and so forth. Any suggestions? So the so there there are a couple of ways that you could potentially do this. Right? So, like, if you have, like, the the master list that kinda compares giving trends year over year, There are a couple of different ways that a report could potentially show that information. Right? So in one regard, you may have, you may be utilizing the summary fields to say, you know, one year ago, two year ago, year to date, you know, what have you. And so here you have, like you know, there are options here for one year ago, received and soft credit amount, but there's not and then there's a one year ago received amount, but there's not actually a one year ago soft credit amount. So the received and soft credit inflates those amounts, right, because it is taking into consideration that John Smith made a $500 gift and he also is has a $500 soft credit. And what ends up showing up here under this column is that, you know, one year ago, he gave $1,000, and that's not exactly true. Right? Now the other way that you could potentially do this is by utilizing under the journal fields. There it is. You can have multiple received options. So we can add received a bunch of times, and you can have soft credit amount a bunch of times. And you can utilize in this if we, if we click on these three little dots here, you can utilize the aggregates. Right? So you can say, you know, year to date soft credit amount. So if your query is pulling a bunch of journal entries over the last, you know, five, six years or whatever, then you could say, okay. Well, now I can look at the year to date, soft credit amount and the year to date received amount, and you can even change the the names of the columns themselves right here as you go in and you set up the aggregate to do year to date, and then you have the ability to then do one year ago, two year ago, three year ago, so on and so forth. And then the aggregates would be able to separate that, right, and say, okay. In 2026, John Smith gave $500, and he has a $500 soft credit. In 2025, he gave $1,000 and had a $750 soft credit amount. And, you know, and so you could be able to do that, year over. And so you would be able to still see both of those amounts year over year. Now the it it does the same would also go if you did ultimately decide to do a third column that would that would pull in the received and soft credit So that would then be able to also be utilized with these aggregates. So that then you can say, here's the received amount, here's the soft credit amount, and here's the total value of both of those columns for each line. Now the only problem is is that these are going to to kinda spread out to the, you know, horizontally instead of it being kind of separated or or or kind of, done in a vertical manner. But with you know, one of the things, of course, you can do with with, Excel once you kind of export it out is you can say, okay. I wanna freeze everything into column a so that when I scroll over, I'm still seeing, you know, the person's name and I can see the columns that say, you know, this is, one year ago received one year ago soft credit, one year ago received and soft credit or what have you. So I don't know, Amber, if that if that is, helpful for you or if that, if that makes sense or if that's something that that might be able to be helpful there for you. Great. Okay. Yeah. And, I mean and that's where, you know, that's where the reporting kinda comes in handy that you can separate and combine the received and soft credit. I mean, of course, received is going to be one of the most common report columns that you select, period. But then you have you know, you still can say, oh, here's what the soft credit amount is, and, you know, you also have this received and soft credit that kinda gives a grand total of what I like to call influence. Right? It's like the received and soft credit should never be taken as the gospel of what you've actually physically received, but what it is meant to be is the the summation of somebody's influence that, that they've had. And and for some people, it's going to be largely the hard credit, the gifts. For for other people, it might be a combination of both that are relatively fifty fifty. And for some people, maybe they largely do soft credits. Right? So, definitely, different options for you there to to take into to consideration. Alright. So let's see here. Desiree asked, how can you add to see the mailing status at the top of the account? Well, this one's an easy one. Thank you for giving me something I don't have to think too hard about here halfway through our session. Yes. So whenever you're in account, you see right here that you have this account header. You can always click the edit header, And here, you can, set up a couple of different rows. And, what you can do is you have various, you know, information that you can pull. You can pull additional things from the personas. You can pull additional things from the account level. You can also pull various, user defined fields as well. So one of the things that you will see here is let's see here. Under base, you see that I have account type. I have mailing status. All of these are, if I just check them and then I save and go to personas, they will then appear in whichever of the columns that I I click to save that in, it will show up there. And so you can see here my mailing status of do not mail, I have placed on the, on the second row there and, with additional other user defined fields here as well, like, you know, I put in the favorite color, so that's why blue is there. I put in the birth date. Yes. You're reading that correctly. I am less than six months away from 50. I don't know how I feel about that, but here we are. I like to say I stay young at heart so, but yeah so all of that stuff can be added and then you know up here I have my short salutation, you know, by default I think typically you have the address and I think email but you can always go into edit header and add in additional, add in additional, you know, information and columns as you as you see fit. And you can even add additional rows too. So And, Cindy, yes. I agree. I think, you know, to be honest with you, I I felt like my life really started at 40. So, yeah, that's that's what I felt was the really sweet spot of of, you know, of feeling pretty good about everything I've, you know, everything I'm doing and everything I've I've been you know, that I did before. So, alright. So what other questions are out there? I can go back here. Let me let me go back through. I know, Cindy, you've kinda been talking to a few people as well and giving some kind of insights there. Just kind of looking back through. Oh, Amber asked, since we have struggled with soft credits on reports, a suggestion was made to create, one donor advised fund for each donor advised fund donor. For example, an account called Fidelity, charitable, John Smith, and then another Fidelity charitable, Angela Adams. What do you think about that idea? What I I don't I'm not in love with that idea. Cindy, I don't know if you have anything that, you know, since you've gotten some, donor advised fund donations, I believe, in the past. What I would probably do is just have one account that's called Fidelity Charitable and then have, you know, if you have John Smith and Angela Adams, all the the people that are connected to that donor advised fund, I would probably have the donor advised fund as an individual account. Each of the individuals, John Smith, Angela Adams, you know, Jane Doe, whatever, they would be, at that point, separate accounts but related, not necessarily with the household, but related to the account. And then when a donor advised fund comes in or a donation that came from the donor advised fund comes in, then you can soft credit John Smith or Angelo Adam, whoever it is that would then get the soft credit. They would not necessarily need to have their own, their own account that would have separate donations in them. So I would say you would just want the one DAF. Yeah. And as Teresa put it, yeah, she's, you know, she's had to clean up all of that sort of detail from the database. Yeah. So, yeah, and I don't know, Cindy. I think you'd you'd spoken earlier about donor advised funds. I don't know. Yeah. One account called Morgan Stanley, then soft credit, the granter or the donor who set it up. If it is from a family foundation then I would set up a relationship with with a real person. Kinda complicated yeah I I do agree Cindy this is this can get a little bit complicated, but it will work well for reports and mailing lists and and you know, because then you can also say, well, I wanna I I want to invite these accounts that made donations over the last six months or whatever to an event, or I wanna send a mailing out or something, but I do not want to include any donor advice on the accounts, I just wanna include individuals, there would be a way that through user defined fields, you'd be able to set all of that up to to help with that. Yeah. What other questions might be floating out there that people have? And if I've missed anything from earlier, please feel free to to to put them back into the chat. I apologize if I did miss anything, but oh, and, you know, we've talked a little bit about relationships and and such today. Let's let's go into a relationship page here real quick. You know, for anybody who maybe have not really messed around too much with relationships, you always have the ability to, you know, click on a new relationship within an account regardless if there's anything already listed there. This is where you would set up like, oh, okay. This is a, you know, parent child or siblings or spouses or friends or, you know, employee employer or what have you. And then you have the ability to set up a you search for the account that you're going to relate. You have the ability to say, oh, nope. Jeff is supposed to be the other side of that, and so we can set that up there. If this was something like spouses or some sort of a family account or something like that, then you have the ability here for the household relationship. Whoever would be marked as primary would be the, quote, unquote, head of household, and it would, by default, make the other person a member of that household. This kinda goes to that situation that was asked about earlier about if somebody passes away. You know, if they are if they are set up with a household relationship, it's just a matter of flipping it so that the, so that the other person is now the primary. You can always edit existing, relationships as well. But this is a good way of, you know, kind of setting up those those relationships between an individual or a family member and the donor advised fund or an employee to an employer's account that might be making donations that you, you know, you have, like, a contact person at the organization or what have you. So yeah. And when you save this, it would show up on the relationships page, and it would say, you know, this is this is the accounts role. And then the related person would also have a role in parentheses next to it. If this was a head of household situation, I save and go to relationships, you'll see a little icon over here. And when you hover over it, it will say who the primary is and who the members of that relationship are. And then you'll see that the head of household will get a solitary guy here next to their name. Oh, Cindy asked, when you enter a soft credit like you did in the start from a journal entry, what would be the best way to find just those and not others from, donor advised fund? I'm thinking for, like, board members and so on. Yeah. So this is where, you know, when you get into the query, this actually ends up becoming something that becomes relatively simplistic because it just uses different things in the criteria. Right? It's it's no different than saying, oh, I only wanna find donations from these types of accounts or these people or or whatever. So when you do, like, a a new query, you have the ability, you know, like any other query, you would set this up probably, with, you know, a name of its own. You'd probably have base all constituents as your starting query. You'll probably change this to journal entry so you can actually see the journal entry so that you can get, like, the the, soft credit amount and all of that stuff. But, really, this kinda comes down to the exact same things that you might do in other queries. The primary thing would be here is that, you know, you might have a journal entry date to say, I wanna see the the people who, did this in September. And then you can say journal entry types, and I this is where I would say soft credit without hard link. And what this will do is it will just pull the soft credit amounts. Now from here, you can also go in and, you know, select any other user defined fields that might help you sort out or any other fields that might help you sort out to say, I want only the the, I only want the the soft credits that are from a a particular type of individual or a particular user defined field grouping or whatever. So it would work very similarly. It would just depend on how the accounts are set up to say, you know, this is the exact group of people that that I want. And, yeah, Priscilla, you can absolutely use any starting, query as you want. I would I I typically usually start with base all constituents because it's always hard to know exactly what everybody has already set up. But if you have a query of just your board members and you wanna find out what soft credits they have in their account, absolutely. Put starting criteria or the starting query as your board members list, and then this down here would help sort out the rest of it. Yeah. Absolutely. You can start from you can start from anything that ultimately looks back at any group of constituents. Yeah. Cindy, does that, does that help you if if you have, like, a list of your board members or you have a list of people that are already specifically Yeah. Yeah. You can yeah. You could do it that way. Yeah. So it's like, yeah, you would start with just the soft credit, journal entry type, and then however you wanna sort out this, like, oh, you know, user defined field or starting query that would give, you know, just your board members. Yeah. Some board give, through soft credit from their DAF. So at that point in time, I would have to I think, Cindy, I would probably have to look at how you have that how you have some things set up to try to kinda figure out. Off the top of my head, I I I don't have a clear answer for you, but I would probably, I could probably figure something out for you if I actually saw, like, the you know, how how everything is set up there. I'm not stumped, but I am but but it it would be dependent on some things and how they would how they are set up. Priscilla asked, would the results differ if you set up, if you set up the query asking for soft credits or set up a report that lists soft credits and just query board members? So, yeah, I mean, the results would differ in one way. Right? So, like, let's say you have all your gifts from board members or all of the journal entries from the board members from a particular time frame. Some might be gifts, some might be soft credits. The key thing that would be different now, technically, a a report that says, okay. Well, just give me the grand total for each board member instead of listing out each individual transaction. Just give me the grand total of what their soft credits were and the time frame. You're still going to see the soft credit amounts that that exist there. It even if you have more than just the soft credits or if you just have the gifts and you wanna find out the linked soft credit or whatever, depending on what you're working from. But if you're just saying, okay. I just wanna see the soft credit amounts from these board members. I've got a list that's got a bunch of their journal entries. If you do a report where it collapses the groups and it just has one person per line, then you would be able to see the soft credit amount. The only main difference is you may end up with some extra folks because some of those folks may have just made donations and are not soft credited to anything. So those people would show up with zero, but that would only indicate that your your query pulled them in from some other type of journal entry, maybe like a gift or something like that. The key thing is is that if you utilize the individual transaction received, you're cutting out any soft credit journal entries. But if you're just pulling any journal entry or you're coming in here the journal entry types and selecting the different types of journal entries that you do wanna see, so maybe you wanna see, you know, gifts, recurring gift, payments, disbursements, you know, split transactions, all of the other stuff that might be there, and soft credit is checked. You would get the soft credit entries into the results. The it's just you gotta remember that soft credits don't have a technical received amount, so the individual transaction received does not pull in those soft credits. Now if you do do a query that is individual transaction received greater than or equal to a dollar from September, you might pull in gifts that in the background have attached, soft credits to them. In the report then, you would be able to say, here's the received amount, and here's the linked soft credit name and the linked soft credit account. That stuff could still be pulled into a report, but it would not pull in these donors' soft credits that are separate from, you know, any other transactions or anything like that. Hopefully, that that explanation helped. Is there a way to have is there a way to have one column that includes all of the donors giving soft and hard credit that doesn't inflate the total? In this case, donor advised funds would be included on the report. Yeah. So in that sort of situation, this is where you get into that concept of, okay, well, what fields do we want to include? Right? Because if a donor advised fund is going to show up on the report, one of the things that you can always do is you can always include the linked soft credit amount. So come down here, you see linked soft credit amount. That can always be added to a report. And that way you would have the received column. So the received column is acting as a, you know, is acting as the as the as the actual gospel as to what you receive. This is what you've brought in. This is what you put in the bank. This the linked soft credit amount and linked hard credit amount could show that people had linked soft credits in their or they have a soft credit that has a linked hard credit amount. So in that case, they might show that they have, you know, a $100 donated, but $500 have a linked hard you know, a linked hard credit amount because they were soft credited to somebody else. And then on that other account, it would say that they gave $500 and that they have a linked soft credit of $500. So it would still be able to show both of those without inflating the numbers, but also indicating that, yes, there are, there there are amounts there that, you know, that that they are sitting there as a, as as somebody who's received or has been applied a soft credit to their account. So the the report columns, if you separate out, like, you know, what their received amount is versus what any kind of linked soft credit or soft credit amount type of information. As long as that's separated out, it would still display the information, but it won't inflate the actual received amount. So I would probably play around a little bit with those with those columns under journal fields in a report. Or you can always search and just search for anything that says soft credit And then go through here of all the different things that have soft credit in their name. You can kinda play around with some of those various columns. Now yeah. And, Cindy, if you track what is, you know, what is or is not a donor advised fund or a donor advised journal entry, as long as that's tracked somehow, you would be able to say, you know, these are the funds or these are the, you know, or I don't want this box checked. Like, you could say, you know, do you have a checkbox for is this a donor advised fund gift? If you say, you know, in the query, if you were to say, you know, I want where's the I'm just going here. If you have a user defined field, let's say let's say this is the field that says, you know, that something is a donor advised fund or something. You could say field has no value, and anything that that would be then marked as a donor advised fund or whatever would not be included in your queries results, in which case then you would be able to say, here are the gifts from board members that are not part of a donor advised fund, or I'm sorry, the soft credits from the, you know, you know, whatever. So there could be some options there with our, with our query that that would be able to to help out with finding that. Alright. Last call for any questions that are still outstanding. Oh, you're very welcome, Cindy. Always happy to to help. And, yeah, sometimes some of the you know, to be honest with you, sometimes I've been asked questions in these sessions. I'm sure those of you who've gone come to enough of these know that sometimes I have to sometimes think them out loud to to come to an answer, and sometimes that's just you know, that's part of the fun of having a database. Right? It's you know, sometimes it's, you know, trying to figure out it's like, well, you know, working backwards from an end result or trying to figure out what might be the best way to set something up to get to an end result. That's always, you know, thinking things out loud sometimes, is just part of this you know, part of the fun of having a database for better or worse. So alright. Well, I don't think I see any other questions coming in. So, one of the things, that I always, you know, I always have the slide here at the end here. You know, the the, knowledge base is going to be exceptionally helpful. You can always go to the, the the Blackbaud knowledge base to and that should be something that's linked from the question mark icon inside of eTapestry. You know, you can always search for soft credits or report with soft credits or something like that. The the session from last week, like I said, I had a bunch of links to knowledge based articles that talked about various different ways that you can query on, you know, to get soft credit information or how to end up putting in soft credits or whatever the case may be. Most of that time, whenever I have a bunch of, documents or or resources available to you, oftentimes that comes from knowledge base. So I always recommend people check out the knowledge base. The community is getting a refresh here pretty soon, and, would love to see folks, get over there and sign up for that, and and participate in there. Great place to share ideas and to, you know, and and to kinda share experiences and how you how you've done some things and and, you know, pick the brains of others if you're trying to accomplish something inside the database itself. So I always recommend that as well. With that, I think we are pretty much at the end of, this, this week's session here. Next month, we are going to be, back at it here in mid October. I've got some, funds, approaches, campaigns, goals. Some another kind of thing that I don't think oftentimes comes up or or sometimes things that people don't realize that you could do, with those areas. So, you know, just a little bit more tips and tricks for you as we, start to, get close to the end of the year. Maybe something to consider as you move into 2027 as well because of some of the things that are available in those fields. So, so, yes, look forward to seeing you here in a few weeks, actually, two weeks. And, hopefully, everybody is, going to have a great rest of their day and a great rest of the week. And I look forward to talking to you again in just a couple of weeks.