Donation Advisor

The donation advisor function allows you to credit the actual profile that makes a donation while acknowledging a different profile as having directed the gift to your organization. Only one profile can be added as a Donation Advisor. 

Who: Donor development teams and gift processing staff managing complex donor recognition scenarios.

When to Use Donation Advisor

• Acknowledge a donor advised fund/DAF gift under the donor's profile while applying the actual donation credit to the charitable giving account.
• Record an IRA gift and credit the financial institution housing the IRA with the actual donation, and add the donor that directed the gift from their IRA as the donation advisor.
• Recognize a corporate gift with the employee who facilitated it.
• Track advised donations separately from direct donations for reporting needs.

When Not to Use Donation Advisor

Many organizations migrating from legacy systems are accustomed to using soft credit fields to recognize spouses. This practice will create inaccurate donation reporting in CommunitySuite.

• Soft crediting a spouse who is a member of a household profile creates inaccurate reporting.
• If you have more than one profile to tag to the donation, it is recommended to use the soft credit field instead.

How Donation Advisor Works

• The profile entered in the Donor field on the donation record retains credit for the donation.
• The profile added as a donation advisor will be reportable and the donation appears under Advised Donations in their donation history. 
• Fund advisors when looking at donations to their fund will see donation advisors that have been added to donations.

Donation Advisor versus Soft Credit

• The soft credit field on a donation is a way to tag a list of profiles associated with the gift. This may be the better option if you have multiple profiles related to one gift. 
  • An example of this might be paycheck withdrawals by teachers that wish to support their school's endowment fund and the school sends one lump sum as the donation. 
• Soft credit functions differently than donation advisor because the donation record will not appear on the soft credited profile's donation history. 
• There is custom reporting available for soft credit donations that will provide a reportable way to see this gift association. If a donation has several soft credits associated to it, each one will be listed separately.

Reporting on Advised Donations

• Donation reporting in CommunitySuite will show credit to the original donor. 
• The Donor Rollup Report is the exception, in this report the donation automatically shifts to the advisor. 
• The Donor Rollup Report also rolls up all gifts from household members, so if spouses are also being added as donation advisors, those advised gifts from spouses will be counted twice and will negatively impact reporting accuracy.
• Upload IDs Custom Reports includes a workflow for adding donation advisors to a mailing list or campaign. 
• A custom report for Advised Donations is also available. It is recommended to pull in the Advisor Profile ID field to the report. 

Acknowledging Advised Donations

Generally, donation advisors do not need actual tax receipts from your organization because they already receive them from the charitable entity they donated through (such as Fidelity or Charles Schwab). However, sending an acknowledgement is recommended.

It is recommended to have a separate tax receipt template that can serve as an acknowledgement letter that does not include the charitable gift language needed on standard tax receipts. More information on using a donation type to generate a custom tax receipt letter for a donation advisor is available in Record an IRA Gift.

Add a Donation Advisor

1. Create a donation.
2. Click Add Advisor on the donation record. 
   
    
3. Set the donation advisor.
   • If a profile exists, then enter the donation advisor's name in the Search Profile field and select the profile from the drop-down list.
     
      
   • If the advisor is anonymous or unknown, click Advisor Is Anonymous or Unknown.
     

When a donation advisor is applied, the profile appears on the donation record in the Advisor field.

The donation also appears under Advised Donations in the donation advisor's donor designation.

Remove a Donation Advisor

1. Navigate to the donation record that has the donation advisor.
2. Click Clear Advisor next to the advisor's name in the Advisor field. 
   
    
3. Click Yes to confirm deletion.