Hello, I have a best practices question regarding Donor Advised Funds. My organization is getting an influx of Vanguard Charitable DAFs, but they're on the Paypal Giving Fund account. The individual donor is disclosed and will receive the soft credit, but which DAF is assigned the hard credit? How would one track the two DAFs for one gift?
@Maja Perez: I agree with @Kirst Belen regarding the overall approach of how to record this donation. Regarding whether PayPal Giving Fund or Vanguard gets hard credit, I recently looked into this and found the following.
https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/givingfund/home
PayPal Giving Fund helps people support their favorite charities online. We receive donations through PayPal, eBay, and other technology platforms and make grants to our donors' recommended charities. PayPal Giving Fund is an IRS-registered 501(c)(3) public charity (Federal Tax ID: 45-0931286).
Consequently, it seems that PayPal Giving Fund is the hard-credit donor. However, without seeing your actual record, I am making assumptions which may not actually apply.
Just to cover some other similarly confusing donation platforms, here is some info I found on other giving services.
- YourCause: See this link.
- "YourCause will provide donors with a tax acknowledgment from the Blackbaud Giving Fund. Your organization is not responsible for providing a tax acknowledgment for any donation that comes from YourCause. . . . Donations made via YourCause are legally made to the Blackbaud Giving Fund and the Blackbaud Giving Fund would issue the tax acknowledgment. "
- Fidelity
- If the gift is a retirement fund distribution, hard credit goes to the owner of the retirement fund.
- If the gift is a grant from Fidelity Charitable, hard credit goes to Fidelity Charitable, and soft credit goes to the entity that requested the grant. Look for an email like the following with text including a line similar to, "grant(s) made byFidelity Charitable® at the recommendation of our donor(s). . . . You may choose to thank the donor(s), but please do not issue a tax receipt to either Fidelity Charitable® or the recommending donor(s) for any grants."
- Benevity: See this link regarding tax receipts. They state, " If you are inquiring about how to credit donations for tax purposes, note that it is the foundation that should be credited. Our foundation partners operate with donor-advised funds and they are responsible for the collection and disbursement of all donations." See this Benevity link regarding their partner foundations.
