A board member calls the development office. She’s given $1,000 a year for five years, and her employer has matched every gift. Her husband also sent a check from the family foundation last spring. You open her constituent record in Altru, and the summary shows… her own direct gifts. The match and the foundation gift are there somewhere, but not where you looked first.
That gap matters. A front-line staff member, a gift officer prepping for a lunch, or a director signing a thank-you letter wants one number: what has this person been responsible for? Here’s how soft credits and matching gifts usually show up in Altru, why the summary view tends to undercount people, and what you can set up so staff see the full picture without digging.
Hard credit, soft credit, and match: three different things
It helps to be precise before changing anything, because these get blurred in conversation.
- Hard credit goes to the constituent who actually paid. That’s the record that owns the revenue.
- Soft credit is recognition for someone who influenced or directed a gift they didn’t pay for: a spouse on a household gift, a donor-advised fund holder, a board member who solicited a corporate gift.
- A matching gift is revenue from a company, hard-credited to the company, tied back to the employee’s original gift. Many organizations also give the employee a soft credit for the match.
Summary totals in Altru are generally built around revenue the constituent owns. Soft credits and matches sit on revenue hard-credited to someone else, so in many setups they don’t roll into the same totals. Keeping them apart protects financial reporting. It’s just not the number a gift officer wants to see.
First, confirm what your summary already shows
What a constituent summary displays depends a lot on how your organization has configured it. Before building anything, pick three test constituents you know well: one with only direct gifts, one with soft credits, and one whose employer matches. Compare what the summary shows against what you know to be true. Then check the revenue history and any recognition areas on the same records.
If you can’t tell whether a given total includes soft credits, don’t guess. Ask Blackbaud support, or test in a sandbox by adding a soft credit to a test record and watching which numbers move.
Ways to surface soft credits and matches today
1. Smart fields for lifetime totals
Smart fields calculate a value per constituent on a schedule, and those values can be shown on records and used in queries. If your Altru has a smart field option that counts soft-credited or recognition revenue, set one up for lifetime soft credits and another for the current fiscal year. If you’re not sure which smart field types are available to you, check the smart field list in your administration area or confirm with support before promising anything to the development team.
2. Recognition credits
If your Altru setup uses recognition credits, some organizations handle “who gets credit” there rather than through soft credit alone, especially for donor walls and annual report listings. If your team already uses recognition, make sure matches and household gifts are being recognized consistently, and point staff to that area of the record when they need a full total.
3. A saved query staff can run in seconds
A constituent query that pulls direct revenue, soft-credited revenue, and matched revenue in separate columns is often the most honest answer. Save it, name it clearly (“Donor credit summary, by constituent”), and share it with the people who prep for donor meetings. Separate columns also avoid the classic mistake of adding hard and soft credit into one number and double-counting the household.
4. Matching gifts entered the same way every time
None of the above works if matches are entered three different ways. Agree on one method, for example: hard credit to the company, soft credit to the employee, and a link or note referencing the original gift. Write it into your gift entry procedures. Then run a query for corporate revenue with no soft credit attached so you can catch the ones that slipped through.
5. A short note or alert for top donors
For a small group of major donors, a constituent note summarizing their combined giving (updated once a year) is low-tech but effective. Front-line staff see it immediately, and it doesn’t depend on anyone remembering to run a query.
Things to decide as a team
- Which number do you quote to the donor? Many organizations thank donors for their own gifts plus matches, but keep household soft credits out of personal totals to avoid crediting the same dollar twice.
- Which number goes in the annual report? Usually recognition-based, and often different from the finance total. That’s fine, as long as everyone knows which is which.
- Who maintains the smart fields and queries? If nobody owns them, they drift out of date and staff stop trusting them.
Quick answers
Will adding soft credits change our revenue totals?
It shouldn’t. Soft credits are recognition, not money, and the hard-credited constituent still owns the revenue for financial reporting. Confirm on a test record if a particular report looks off.
Can a match be soft-credited to the employee automatically?
It depends on how your Altru is set up to record matching gifts. Test it with one match in a sandbox, or ask Blackbaud support, before you train staff on it.
