A board member’s company writes a check, and you soft credit the board member so their giving history reflects the gift they arranged. Months later, someone pulls up the board member’s record and sees a soft credit amount with no obvious answer to the follow-up question: who actually paid?
That gap is common in Altru, and it’s mostly a matter of where the information lives. The donor’s name is never lost. It just sits on the revenue record, not on the soft credit itself. Here’s how to get it in front of the people who need it.
How a soft credit is stored
When you add a soft credit, you’re attaching a second constituent to a piece of revenue. The revenue still belongs to the constituent who paid it. That person (or organization, or household) is the donor of record, gets the hard credit, and is the name that drives receipts and tax acknowledgments.
The soft credit recipient is linked to that same revenue record with an amount. So the relationship looks like this:
- Revenue record: the payer’s name, the amount, the date, the designation.
- Soft credit: a pointer from that revenue to another constituent, with a credited amount.
Anything that starts from the soft credit recipient and wants the payer’s name has to travel back through the revenue record to find it. Some Altru screens and reports make that hop for you; others only show the soft credit amount. How much you see on a given screen can vary with your Altru version and configuration, so the reliable approach is to stop relying on any single screen and build the view you want.
Option 1: Open the revenue record
For a one-off question, this is the fastest route. From the soft credit recipient’s record, find the soft credited gift in their revenue or giving history and open the underlying revenue record. The constituent on that record is your donor. It’s fine for answering a phone call. It doesn’t scale to a stewardship report or a board packet.
Option 2: Build a query that puts both names on one row
This is the approach worth setting up once and saving. The goal is a list where each row shows the soft credit recipient, the actual donor, the amount, and the date side by side.
- Start an ad-hoc query from a revenue source, since the revenue record holds the payer.
- Add the revenue constituent’s name (and lookup ID, so you can tell apart two people with the same name) as output fields.
- Find the soft credit fields related to that revenue and add the soft credit recipient’s name and the soft credit amount.
- Add the revenue date, amount, and designation or fund for context.
- Filter as needed: a date range, a specific recipient, or only revenue that has a soft credit.
The exact field names and how the soft credit group appears in the query field list differ enough between setups that it’s worth exploring in your own query designer rather than following anyone’s click-path. If you can’t find soft credit fields under a revenue source, check whether your database has a soft credit-specific query view, or ask Blackbaud support which source exposes both sides of the relationship.
One thing to watch: a gift with two soft credit recipients will show up as two rows. That’s correct, but it means you shouldn’t sum the revenue amount column on this query and call it total giving.
Option 3: Name the donor in letters to the soft credit recipient
The most common reason people want the donor name is stewardship. You want to thank the board member, the employee whose company matched their gift, or the family member who organized a memorial gift, and the letter should say who gave.
If your acknowledgment process draws from a query or export, add the donor name field from the query above and merge it into the letter: “Thank you for arranging Acme Corporation’s gift of $5,000.” Before relying on this, test it in a sandbox or on a small batch, because whether a given letter or acknowledgment process in Altru can reach the payer’s name from the soft credit side depends on how that process sources its data. If it can’t, a query-based export merged in your word processor or email tool is a dependable fallback.
Option 4: Record the context at entry
Some teams also add a short note or reference on the revenue record when they enter the soft credit (“Soft credit to J. Rivera, board solicitation”). It isn’t a substitute for the query, but it helps anyone who opens the gift later understand why the credit exists. If you do this, agree on a consistent wording so it’s searchable.
Things that commonly go wrong
- Using a soft credit when the gift really belongs to someone else. If a spouse paid but both should be recognized equally, a household or recognition approach may suit you better than a soft credit. Decide on your rule and write it down.
- Soft crediting the full amount to multiple people and then reporting soft credit totals as if they were dollars raised. Soft credits are recognition, not revenue.
- Exporting only the recipient side. A spreadsheet of soft credit recipients and amounts without the donor column is exactly the problem you started with. Keep the donor name in every saved view.
Quick answers
Does the soft credit recipient get a tax receipt?
No. Receipts follow the constituent who paid. The soft credit recipient gets recognition, and any letter to them should be a thank-you, not a receipt.
Can I make the donor name show on the soft credit recipient’s record automatically?
That depends on the screens available in your version of Altru. If it doesn’t appear where you need it, a saved query like the one above is the practical way to surface it. Confirm with Blackbaud support before building something more elaborate.
