Building strong relationships through soft credits

Dani Cluff: Good morning or good afternoon, everyone, depending on where you’re logging in from today. I’m over in Minneapolis, so I’m still on Central time and wrapping up my morning. But good afternoon to all of you on the East Coast and Pacific Coasters. Thank you for joining us. I hope you’re awake, have your coffee, and are ready to learn this early in the morning for you.

We’ll give it just a second as people get logged in. I don’t want anybody to miss out on anything that Amy’s going to be sharing with us today.

While we’re waiting, if you want to introduce yourselves in the chat and say where you’re joining from, please do. I said I’m joining from Minneapolis. Amy, do you want to share where you’re joining from today?

Amy Juba: Yes. I’m coming to you live from Amarillo, Texas, which is what we call the Texas Panhandle, closer to five other state capitals than Austin. It’s unusually rainy and cold today on this spring day, so I’m kind of glad I’m inside with all of you.

Dani Cluff: Absolutely.

Well, I realized I didn’t say my own name. For all of you who have joined today, I’m Dani Cluff, the channel marketing coordinator here at Bloomerang. I’m so happy to be with all of you today, and so happy to have, of course, Amy Juba with us, who’s ready to share “Building Strong Relationships Through Soft Credits.” We’re so lucky to have her.

A few housekeeping notes. You will receive the recording today. We are recording today’s session and Amy’s slides, so you’ll have everything you need when we wrap things up. If you have any questions as we go through the webinar, add those to the Q&A area of Zoom. If you have any issues there, you can put them in the chat, but the Q&A area will be your best bet to make sure I don’t miss them.

For any of you who might be unfamiliar with Bloomerang, we are an online platform for your donor management, volunteer management, events, online fundraising, and so much more. Please feel free to indicate in our poll at the end of today’s webinar if you’d like to learn more about what we do.

And, of course, wonderful Amy Juba is here with us today to share all of her expertise. I don’t want to take any more of your time. I know thirty minutes goes by quick. So I’m just going to hand things over to you to share what everyone’s here to learn.

Amy Juba: Okay. Thank you, Dani. I’m going to try to share my screen and make sure we’re good to go. Everybody can see that, I suppose.

Alright. Without further ado, I’m going to move my Zoom menu so I don’t block anything down here. I’m Amy Juba. As you know, I am a consultant here in Amarillo, Texas, and I am a huge Bloomerang fan.

In twenty years of fundraising, I have used a lot of different CRMs, and I’ve been using Bloomerang about five years, through several of my clients. I’ve put a lot of clients in. I’ve transitioned a lot of clients from other products. I really do think it’s one of the most intuitive and easy to use products that really is robust. And I think a lot of us only scratch the surface of what’s available.

So today, I’m going to get started talking about soft credits, and many of you may already be very familiar with it. Dani, I think you’re going to set up a poll. I just kind of want to see a quick show of hands: are you active Bloomerang users, or maybe you’re just researching or thinking about adding Bloomerang to your CRM repertoire? Take a quick minute to vote, just so I know who I’m talking to, and I’ll base my pace on how many Bloomerang users we have out there.

Alright. Y’all just keep voting.

And let’s see. I’m going to close that down. Alright. So, have you ever been in your office? I was a development director at one time, and I’d get a random check in my office or in my box from someone who’s never given to us before. We’d have no idea why we were getting this check. Or what happens a lot is your financial officer or your bookkeeper calls and says, “We just got a direct deposit, and it’s from Coca-Cola or from Fidelity, and we have no idea why it’s there.” So you have that conundrum of why we got this donation.

If you can finally track it down, and I’ll give you some tips for tracking that down in a minute, who is going to get credit for that gift, and how do you recognize the donor? Is it the institution that wrote the check and actually made the donation, or is it the person who likes your organization and made the gift referral for you?

I want to encourage you to take a few extra steps. I’m going to show you tips and tricks that will help you solidify some of those donor relationships and help you secure more future gifts of this type.

So let’s move forward with Bloomerang. By the end of this session, I have three goals. You’re going to learn how to enter donations with soft credits in Bloomerang. You’re going to create acknowledgment letters for both the donating institution and the soft credit. And then we’ll touch quickly on how soft credited gifts appear on Bloomerang’s annual giving statements.

Without further ado, here are some ideas of why you might use soft credits. You might get donor advised funds. I’ve seen Fidelity, and some come through Schwab. It may be something that comes from your own community foundation in your own neck of the woods, which may hold some donor advised funds. Sometimes they come through giving platforms. I’ve seen them from Charities Aid Foundation and Network for Good, and then very often we might see them through Giving Tuesday.

Here in Amarillo, we are so blessed to have our Community Foundation sponsor a seven-day week of giving that leads up to Giving Tuesday. Those gifts come through GiveGab to the Community Foundation, and then eventually come in one direct deposit, an electronic transfer. So you get a lot of soft credits, and you need to know how to enter those correctly. And then you might have a lot of corporations that do gift matching, which is a really great way to double those gifts.

I’m going to show you a quick little pro tip, if you will. You’ll see some of these with the yellow snipe in the corner. That just means it’s a bonus, kind of outside Bloomerang, that maybe helps you do your job a little better, maybe find some hidden leads.

As I was searching for matching gift companies that we can consistently rely on, I came across a company called Double the Donation. This is not an endorsement. I’ve never used them before. Right on their website, if you click this link, you’re going to see the twenty top matching gift companies, those leaders in corporate giving. Some of those logos you saw a minute ago, Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson, are on that list. If you live in a community that has these organizations, that is a really great place to start to find those employees and remind them that their organizations do give.

Because I was going through this, I happened upon the St. Jude’s website. Many of us are familiar with the amazing organization, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. They do those great commercials we see on TV, but they also have a very robust online giving presence. As I was looking at their employer matching gifts, I happened to notice that they use Double the Donation software on their website. So I said, let’s see how this could work for me in my very busy day to see what matching gift companies might be in my neck of the woods.

My husband works for a company that’s a subsidiary of Bank of America. So I plugged Bank of America in, and it immediately pulled up a form that tells me the minimum gift they’ll match, the maximum gift, and who gets matched. You can see full-time and part-time employees. At the bottom, it will even list the organizations that they will match. They’re pretty lenient. If you can prove it’s a 501(c)(3), they’re pretty good. I happen to know that.

Again, this is for donors to go in there and say, “I want to give to this organization. What does my company do?” And it takes them directly to that form, which, obviously, we can’t do. But that’s just a little tip for you, maybe to research a corporation that’s in your neighborhood, see if they do match, and then find some of those employees who could double their gift.

So let’s start with what a soft credit is and why we even track it. What’s important about it? A soft credit gives recognition to a donor who influences the gift but is not necessarily the direct donor. They’re not on the check that you receive. So why should we do this? If you track soft credits in your organization, you’re going to know who influences those gifts, and it’s going to help you develop relationships with other prospective donors out there. It’s really good to know where these gifts are coming from, and those can turn into hard dollars down the road.

There are really two basic steps, like everything with Bloomerang, in adding a soft credit. You add it during the creation of the donation or transaction, and then you link the soft credit to a different constituent than the one who made the gift.

So here you are in your development office. You have a check in front of you. We’re going to call ours Your Town Community Foundation. They gave you a nice, healthy gift of five thousand dollars. Alright, let’s figure out why. How did this come into our neck of the woods?

As you can see, you know how to add a new constituent. First, you’re going to look and see if this organization is already in your database, and for many of you that might be the case. But if you’re a brand new development director or even executive director saying, “How does this work?” then you’re going to add this as a new constituent. In this case, it’s an organization.

Then I highly encourage you to spend a little time to figure out who your contact is going to be with this organization. It’s pretty tempting to just fill in the organization name, and then that fills in all the blanks on the right side with “Dear Your Town Community Foundation” or “To Your Town Community Foundation.” If you can, go on the website, call them, and find out who that real-life person is that manages those donor advised fund gifts or even the corporate matching. Put them in there. Find out who they are. They’re going to be a great source. And particularly if you don’t know who requested this gift, you need to call somebody and find out how we’re getting these great gifts. So take a little time to fill this in when you add this new gift.

Add as much personal information as possible. This is just something I try to do, especially when you have a check right in front of you. You know their address. You know their phone number, but you want to look up a little more information. A lot of times, I will Google the website or the company or the foundation, and specifically look for donor advised funds or matching gifts, and plug that website in so you don’t have to keep looking it up down the road. Do that for the people who come in following you, or some of your colleagues. Spend a little time putting their social media pages in. You’re going to find out a lot by following foundations, corporations, and organizations on social media about grant deadlines, about who’s giving, and about different officers they highlight, which helps you be a little bit closer to those donors.

Also, respect their preferred contact method. I know it’s tempting to think, “Oh, I know this officer wants to know about every one of our events that are coming up,” but they don’t have time. For every one of you, there are hundreds of other nonprofits that would like them to know about their event. So be respectful. Don’t put them on every email. Don’t solicit them as you would other donors. Just respect how they prefer to be contacted.

Again, this is my pro tip. You’re going to get a few of these through the webinar. You probably had this when you set up your Bloomerang account, but as you know, you can customize anything in the constituent section that you want to track, especially if you’re coming over from another software. I had a school once that wanted to know how to track alumni, current parents, and grandparents. In this case, you can track how a constituent is connected to your organization.

My Bloomerang sandbox site says “individual tags.” I’ve set it up as “constituent connection.” Go to your main screen, click on settings, then custom data, and then under constituents, click select. There, you can edit any of the individual tags you want to track. In this case, I would add “foundation.” You might add “matching gift corporation” or “giving platform,” so you know exactly why that constituent is in there.

That serves two purposes. You know who you’re getting the check from. But also, one of my favorite features about Bloomerang, which just came about probably in the last year or so, is groups. If you have set up a field to research groups, you can go back into that profile for the organization. It’s on the front page. Scroll down to groups, click add, and then add them to the group you’ve created.

What’s really cool about that is suddenly you have a one-stop shop to track how many foundations are giving to you or how many matching gifts you’ve received this year. It lists all of them out by address and name. You can see how much revenue has come in and how many transactions. So use that group. It’s not just to send communications to. It’s a really great way to track how they’re doing, especially if you’re going to run a matching gift campaign this year or really target donor advised funds.

So we’re back to entering the donation. This is basic for all of you, probably. As you know, Bloomerang only really requests three things when you’re adding a donation: the date, the amount, and the fund. I’d encourage you to add the campaign as well. And then I like to add the appeal. What I tell my clients is the appeal is going to tell you what’s working. How did you get that gift? In your annual campaign, you may have direct mail. You may have a telethon, a phone-a-thon, or an online giving campaign. In this case, I like to add “donor advised fund” or “matching gifts” so that I can track it. And then, of course, you’re going to add your payment method and the information.

I do like to add a note at the bottom. If you’ve finally learned who recommended this gift, put a quick blurb on who recommended it. I just added a note, “requested by Jimmy Olson,” mainly because I don’t want to forget when I’m going into the next phase.

But here’s the critical issue. Now we’re going to add these soft credits, and Bloomerang makes it so easy. On the right side of your screen, you’re going to see a section that has to do with acknowledgments, and below that is soft credits. In the soft credit section, you’ll click the plus icon and look for the constituent. If they’re already in your database, and they very well might be if they’ve been giving to you or are already recommending gifts to you, you just click on them. You can’t add a household here. You can add one individual.

Then the soft credit pane is going to open on the right side of your screen. You just click the amount, and it will fill in automatically with the whole amount of the check. And then I always say click “No” on acknowledged, and I’m going to show you why in a minute. Those filters are going to be so helpful to automate some of those thank you letters you need to do later.

I just want to remind you, you may have more than one soft credit on the donation. As I mentioned before, with Giving Tuesday or Panhandle Gives, our community foundation will send over one large amount that really comes from many donors through that community foundation. You are going to have a lot of soft credits. You can look on the website and see who recommended this gift, what the gift is made up of, and whose donations are in it. That way, you can enter every single amount and who that donor was in this one step. You might have a list of thirty soft credits based on one donation.

Again, if you don’t know who it’s from, you have two sources. One, call that giving institution. Call that foundation. Call that business if you can. Sometimes corporations are a little trickier to find out. But more than likely, you’ve gotten an email that helps you dig in and research a little more, or you can pull up forms that say who requested the gift. Bookmark that page so you don’t have to keep hunting for it. Maybe even put that link in the corporation’s profile so you never have to look again. But just ask. You really need to know who that soft credit is and who recommended that gift.

Now, how do soft credits appear? You may have noticed this dotted blue line on somebody’s summary page. The green line is obviously hard dollars. These are gifts that the donor has given. The blue line represents the soft credits. We do want to thank these donors. We do want to recognize that they have influenced gifts to your corporation. But that gift does not get double counted in your revenue, so you’re not at risk of accidentally having that gift show up more than once.

Alright. So far, we have learned how to enter donations with soft credits in Bloomerang. Now we’re going to flip gears and learn how to create acknowledgment letters for the donor of a gift that has a soft credit.

Acknowledging soft credits is as easy as any gift, really, but you have three options for every gift. “No” means the constituent hasn’t been thanked, and that’s the default button in Bloomerang. “Yes” means they’ve been acknowledged. Or “Do not acknowledge.” Some of those, you just don’t have anybody to thank, like for a giant corporation. But I would still recommend you always put “No” so that they show up in your filter when you’re running those letters. You don’t want anybody to fall through the cracks. Just put “No,” and you can’t go wrong. You can always change it later.

Once you have done that, let’s create an acknowledgment letter template. This may be second nature to most of you out there, and some of you are still downloading it and doing your letters in Word. If you’re not utilizing all that Bloomerang offers in terms of communications and letters, I highly encourage you to do it, because it makes your life so much easier.

Again, you just click on communications, then letters, and then new. Bloomerang allows you to set up four types of letters: constituent letters, transactions, interactions, and tribute notifications. You can also use soft credits for your tribute notifications, but that’s a whole other webinar. If you want to know more about that, you can find it easily in the Bloomerang support guide. Look up tribute notifications and soft credits.

For now, we’re going to click on transactions, because you have a donation in the system. As you know, you name the letter. Use a brief descriptive name that you’ll use over and over again, because this is a template. The purpose is going to be acknowledgment. You’re thanking them for that gift, and then you create one letter per household, constituent, or transaction. If it’s an organization, household doesn’t matter as much.

Here’s a quick tip: don’t ever check those bottom two fields, “allow blank merge fields” or “allow bad, incomplete, or missing addresses,” or you’re just going to have bad letters that don’t go out. Don’t check those, and Bloomerang will stop you in the process if you’ve got an error.

Up pops a letter. You may have a sample letter in there. Remember, in the body of the letter, you can add Bloomerang data fields. Any field that you have in your profile, you can add. Click on that green Bloomerang icon at the top, and it allows you to choose from a variety of different fields that you can add into your letter. Of course, you add the location where you want the date, your envelope name, your address fields, and so on. Formal name or informal name kind of depends on how formal your organization is and how well you know the donor. And then I always recommend you go in and add soft credit names into the body of that letter. It’s basically going to say, “Thank you for this gift of X amount that was recommended by” the soft credit.

You’re going to continue to edit your donor letter. This is just a pro tip. A lot of you do this, and I get a lot of ideas from letters I’ve seen out there, but add a little blurb at the bottom that talks a little bit about your organization. Maybe you have your tax ID number for ease for them, and say it may be deductible, but consult your tax adviser. A lot of these are foundations. They’re nonprofits. You don’t want to get into their deductibility, other than to say that it is tax deductible because they made a donation to a 501(c)(3) organization.

And then I like to add a little line at the bottom that summarizes the donation. You can merge in the amount, the date, how they paid it, and a lot of different things that are going to make it easier for the donor, especially at the end of the year when they’re doing their taxes.

So here’s the critical part. You’re going to add the filter you need into that letter. Remember, I said I always put acknowledgment status “No.” That’s always going to be your first field, so it’s only going to pull up those gifts you haven’t thanked yet. Hopefully, your database is clean, and it’s only going to show the one or two gifts that you just added today. If it’s not, you may have some cleaning up to do.

Then you’re going to add, remember, we made our appeal “donor advised funds.” That’s just another helpful tip. You’re only going to pull up letters, for instance, to an organization, financial institution, or foundation that actually holds donor advised funds. And then I like to put something related to the soft credit amount so that you narrow it down to only gifts that have soft credits. I just put “at least a dollar.” Notice that Bloomerang automatically fills in “exclude soft credits.” Remove that, so that it doesn’t eliminate all your results.

Finally, save and preview your letter. As you know, you can do a design preview. Just make sure all the blanks look good and the filters look good, and then a recipient preview. You should be looking for the donation you added that day or that week, or hopefully within forty-eight hours of the gift, and it should be exactly the one you expect to be in that field.

Run your letter. As you know, Bloomerang makes it so easy. If you want to see what it really looks like when you print it out on your letterhead, do that test. It’s going to run the first five letters. Print it off, take a look, send it to someone to proofread for you, and it’s not going to change anything on that letter or that donor status. It just lets you look at it and make any changes if needed. When you’re ready, click run, and Bloomerang gives you four options for downloads. You’re going to download your letter, and it’s going to show up wherever your downloads do, as a PDF.

If you’re just doing one letter at a time, go ahead and run it. If there’s an error in it, go back to that donor profile. You can edit the actual letter in the donor letter field. But if you’re doing a bunch of letters, you’re not going to have time to do that, so double-check it before you run a big batch. And, of course, Bloomerang will let you download addresses, envelopes, or labels, whatever makes it really easy for you to send out those mailings quickly.

Notice that once you’ve sent the acknowledgment, the donor profile is updated. You’re going to see the letter that you just sent in their timeline. You’re also going to see that in that transaction, the gift has been acknowledged. That changes automatically to “Yes.” And then it also links the exact letter that you just sent them. Notice we also have the soft credit in there as well. So with one really well-planned donation entry, you’ve captured all that good information that you need to use for next time.

Finally, don’t forget about thanking the soft credit. That’s a mistake a lot of us make. Just because it came from a donor advised fund or from a foundation, do not forget to say thank you. After all, it is that donor who directed the gift your way. Let’s thank them. Make sure they know you appreciate it.

Here’s my quick shortcut. Don’t reinvent the wheel every time you have to write a letter. Take the letter you just wrote, go into the letter template, click on the blue arrow, and copy it. You’re going to have something very similar to what you just set up in the last letter. However, change the name in that donor field to reference that it’s for the soft credit. For your purposes, I added everything, so it’s a really long name that says “acknowledgment letter for soft credit donation influencer.” It should be really clear who’s getting that letter. Or maybe you have one for donor advised funds, or maybe you have one for corporations. It’s an acknowledgment, and then you create one letter per transaction. You probably don’t want to do a household here if only one person has recommended the gift.

So here’s back to my earlier pro tip. Go back in and make a custom field for any way that people give to you using soft credit. In this case, I added a field for donor advised fund, so I can put the specific name of that donor advised fund and recognize it properly, and then the name of the institution holding it. So you never have to wonder again, “Goodness, where did this check come from?” As you can see, I named this the Olson Family Donor Advised Fund, so it gets credited the right way. Maybe there’s a letter attached to your gift that states that specifically, or you found that out through talking to the foundation or the referring donor. And then, again, put in the institution. That’s going to make it super, super easy when you’re writing that soft credit letter, because you can plop in the name of the donor advised fund and the name of the institution holding it.

When you save it, preview, and run it, you can see how clean that soft credit letter is. It reads: “We wanted to inform you we’ve received a donation from the Olson Family Donor Advised Fund in the amount of five thousand dollars. We’re grateful to you for requesting that your community foundation, Your Town Community Foundation, send us this generous donation from your donor advised fund.” It makes it real personal and makes sure they know that you got the gift and that you’re really grateful for it.

This is a whole other webinar, but just quickly, remember some of these rules for donor advised funds specifically. Don’t send a generic form letter. Do not refer to anything as tax deductible. They’ve already taken their tax deduction when they made that gift to a donor advised fund. And don’t tell the donor they can receive anything of value from this gift. Pro tip: do not ever use a donor advised fund gift for your fundraising event ticket or a membership. You can let them pay for a sponsorship, but they need to buy a ticket to your event outside of that gift from the donor advised fund.

So finally, we’ve learned how to enter donations with soft credits in Bloomerang. We’ve learned how to create acknowledgment letters for both the donating institution and the soft credit. And finally, let’s see how it looks on Bloomerang’s annual giving statements in our last twenty seconds here. Here’s the year end giving statement. Bloomerang has given us a gift in the last few years. You go to the profile, scroll to the bottom, and you will see their 2024 giving statement. I did change the date to 2024 so you could see what it looks like. It truly shows a tax-deductible gift here for the Community Foundation. For Mr. Olson, it’s going to show an indirect donation that he cannot write off. At this point, we can’t edit those fields too much in Bloomerang, those giving statements, but they sure are easy and fun to use. You can always customize a letter or an email on top of it.

I’m a huge fan of Bloomerang. They make it so easy. I just want to thank you for joining us for this thirty-minute webinar. You’re going to get the slides, but if you have questions, feel free to visit my website or shoot me an email. And, of course, if you want to learn more about adding Bloomerang, if you don’t already have it, you can click on that link I will send you, or go to bit.ly/BloomerangJuba.

Dani Cluff: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Amy. I know we’re right up against the end of our webinar time today. We did have a lot of questions, so I encourage you to hold on to those questions and reach out to Amy. She’s so happy to answer your questions.

Thank you, Amy, again so much for walking us through that today. I know your slides are going to be incredibly helpful for everybody looking back through today’s webinar. And thank you, everyone, for taking time out of your mornings to join us today. It is not lost on us how busy a lot of you are, so thank you so much for being here. Have a wonderful rest of your day, everyone. Bye.