What is a soft credit?
A soft credit is a mechanism to recognize people or organizations who influenced the collection of a contribution, but did not donate directly. Since soft credits don't affect account totals, they can be tracked purely for strategic and relationship building purposes.
Example scenario
Sarah, a board member at an animal shelter, reconnects with her college roommate Emily at a community event and shares her passion for the shelter's work. Two weeks later, Emily donates $1,000 online.
The fundraising team assigns Sarah as the soft credit recipient for Emily's donation. Sarah's donor report now shows:
Direct donations: $500
Soft credits: $1,000
The animal shelter now recognizes that Sarah’s impact goes further than the $500 she raised directly; her total influence was $1,500. By tracking soft credits, the shelter can identify Sarah as a key ambassador, appropriately recognize her influence, and build better reports on board member effectiveness.
The value of tracking soft credits
Soft credit attributions allow organizations to more accurately measure the effectiveness of fundraising campaigns by understanding the influence of individuals or other organizations within their network. Tracking soft credit unlocks the ability to:
Acknowledge key supporters
Visualize who has influence across your donor base
Measure the effectiveness of your outreach in a more nuanced way
Trace the origin of your largest gifts
Using filters to segment supporters based on both direct giving and soft-credited influence, you can tailor emails, texts, and other engagement efforts to those who are driving meaningful revenue results.
When to use: soft credit recipient or fundraiser
In addition to recording a soft credit recipient for a contribution, you can record a fundraiser. While both functionalities allow you to recognize a person other than the donor for the donor's contribution, they should be used to track a different type of relationship.
A fundraiser owns the contribution: they ask, cultivate, or close the gift. You can think of the fundraiser as the "recruiter" of the donor; the donor contributed because the fundraiser prompted them to do so. For example, an athlete running a marathon to raise money directly asks for donations from friends and family and so is the fundraiser of their contributions.
A soft credit recipient is acknowledged for their connection to a contribution: the gift is connected to them relationally or strategically. A soft credit recipient may not have a personal or ongoing relationship with the donor, but ought to be recognized as part of the network that led to a specific contribution being made.
Feature differences
Feature | Soft credits | Fundraiser |
History visible on single person view | X | X |
Can be assigned manually or through donation imports | X | X |
Multiple can be assigned to a donation | X |
|
Can be assigned using a recruiter link and automatically applied to all donations in a series |
| X |
Counts towards personal fundraising pages and leaderboards |
| X |
How to assign a soft credit recipient to a donation
A soft credit recipient can be added to any donation that you're recording or editing in the control panel. You can attribute up to 5 soft credits per donation.
If you're importing donations, you can also assign a soft credit per donation. You can append up to 5 recipients to a single transaction by mapping them to the same donation_id in subsequent imports.