How do you setup an existing donors Match donation?

Hi Bettina,

When Susan’s company makes the matching gift, I recommend making the company the donor and give Susan a soft credit. The company would receive the tax write-off (even if they aren’t being sent an acknowledgment), so they get the “hard credit”. That is certainly the tidiest and most future-proof way of recording the gift.

Yes though, it does require the company to be an Organization contact. If you are attributing it to Susan, it will throw off her giving totals and her tax reporting. If you sent a year-end statement with the donation summary merge tag, the company match donation would populate in her account as if it was her gift, which it isn’t!

If you wanted to avoid creating organization contacts for these likely one-off gifts, maybe try making one single Company Match organization contact. That still gets the proper soft credit marking to the donor you have a relationship with, and you could use Donation Notes or a Custom Field to do additional reporting (like providing the company name).

​@Bettina Bonsall Have you thought about attaching the match donation to the employer’s contact record and then adding a soft credit for Susan? 

Let’s say Susan works for Starbucks. 

• Susan donates $100 a month to your organization. You get that gift on the 5th of the month. You record it on Susan’s profile, you send the acknowledgement on the 7th of the month. 
• Then on the 25th of the month Starbucks then sends you a $100 donation to match Susan’s original gift. 
• I would recommend adding Starbucks as an organization contact record in your system. And adding that $100 gift to Starbucks with a soft credit to Susan since she is the reason you got that donation. 
• You can choose to acknowledge that $100 Starbucks gift, or not. 

My concern is that you are adding $200 to Susan’s profile when in fact she only donated $100. When you send her a year-end donation summary, it will say that her total contributions for the year was $2,400 but she only donated $1,200 and is only eligible for that amount for tax purposes. But because you are adding in the match donation to her profile instead of her employer’s, it looks like she is giving twice as much as she is. 

I think soft credits is the way to go here: 

​@Charles Case types faster than me :) 

This is a great question! Thanks for asking! 

​@Amelia Leggett I love that you mention in the acknowledgement that the gift was matched so Susan feels confident that her employer match was received! 

The organization needs a profile and soft credit to employee. Also, You should add the organization to a group of matching companies. That way if another individual gives that is employed by them you could let them know their organization will match. In the long term this can make a big impact on your giving totals.

The points above are absolutely correct, giving employee hard credit will affect tax reporting, as well as not recording the organization as hard credit could cause issues if the amounts get high enough you need to report or it gets pulled as part of your audit samples.