A soft credit allows more than one constituent to share credit for a single gift. When you soft credit constituents for a gift, you can decide whether to split the credit evenly among all soft credit recipients, give each recipient full credit for the gift, or define your own credit distribution. You can soft credit as many constituents as necessary as long as each soft credit recipient is a constituent in the database.
Note: If you select Automatically soft credit this individual for gifts in The Raiser's Edge, the constituent can receive soft credits from online gifts. For example, on the Relationships tab for Mark Adamson, you can select this checkbox to apply to Mark’s wife, Jane. On your website, Mark submits a donation. After you process the transaction on the NetCommunity page in The Raiser's Edge, you can view the soft credit for Jane in the Raiser’s Edge batch. However, soft credits do not apply to recurring gifts from the website. For more information, see The Raiser’s Edge Constituent Data Entry Guide.
When you enter a gift in your database, you determine the constituents who receive credit for the gift and how much credit each receives. When you create a report, a summary, a mailing, a query, or an export, you can determine how to display credit for gifts in the results. For gifts in reports, summaries, mailings, queries, and exports, you can soft credit the donor, the soft credit recipients, or both. If you credit the soft credit recipients or both the donor and the soft credit recipients, you can determine how the credit distribution appears in the summary, mailing, query, or export results. For matching gifts, you can credit the donor, the matching gift company, or both. Changing the way the credit distribution appears affects only the output of your report, summary, mailing, query, or export. The information on the gift record does not change. Depending on the way you choose to display soft credits and matching gift credits in a report, summary, mailing, query, or export, the gift amounts that appear in the output may not accurately reflect the original gift amount entered on the gift record.
For more information about soft credits, see The Raiser's Edge Gift Records Guide.