Better Donor Targeting with Soft Credit Attribution

Donations aren’t always as simple as a single user filling out a donation page. Maybe that donation came from a donor advised fund or a board member referred them to your site, or they have a corporate matching program.

Without the proper tools to track these giving influences, there’s no way to report and make data driven decisions on donors’ true giving capabilities. That’s why at EveryAction we’ve launched soft crediting.

Soft Crediting allows nonprofits to credit supporters other than the original donor for influencing a donation and use that information to both acknowledge the credit and leverage it for future campaigns.

Tracking soft credits is incredibly important for year end fundraising. According to the 2018 Donor-Advised Fund Report compiled by National Philanthropic Trust, grants distributed by donor-advised funds were estimated at a total over $19 billion—an increase of nearly 20% from the previous year. Contributions to donor advised funds also increased by 16.5%, to a total of $29.23 billion.

Similarly, about 2 billion dollars are donated in corporate matching gifts every year. With these methods of fundraising increasing yearly, it is essential that nonprofits can accurately create attributions and segment donors.

EveryAction makes it easy to store this data by allowing users to add multiple attributions in a contribution record. As seen below, the donor can be added on a contribution with the attribution type of board member giving, workplace giving, or a donor advised fund.

Soft credits can be viewed from a supporter record, showing us multiple soft credits, who the original contributor was, and how the contribution was made.

With this data within the user’s grasp, your organization can ensure you’re properly thanking donors for their direct contributions as well as the contributions they influenced.

Beyond using this data for acknowledgments, utilizing soft credits in reporting allows for a deeper analysis in a donor’s giving potential. A donor with several soft credits is a supporter who is influential and passionate about your cause. When running fundraising campaigns, mobilize these supporters to through continued engagement whether that’s through volunteering, hosting events, or even joining your board.

Once you apply soft credits to a contact record, users can easily run and customize reports on soft credits (helping you better understand and analyze your soft credits data). Our Attribution report is updated with soft credits allowing users to view additional fields such as: Attributed Contact, Attribution Amount, Attribution Type, and Attribution Thanked. Users can also add extra columns to this report including the date the donor was thanked and notes about the attribution.

Soft Credits are in invaluable way for nonprofit professionals to gain a 360 degree view of their donor. It’s easy for this data to get lost in the shuffle of multiple tools, which is we built EveryAction to help nonprofits save time and raise more money with a unified, easy to use CRM that has all of your donor data right in one place.

Interested in learning more about how your nonprofit can grow with EveryAction? Click here!