Create Matching Gifts
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify and track gift-matching organizations.
- Make donations eligible for matching gifts.
- Record a matching gift from an organization.
An additional way that Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) automatically assigns soft credit is through matching gifts. A matching gift is a donation by a company prompted by an employee’s donation to an eligible nonprofit. The company often matches the employee gift dollar-for-dollar, essentially doubling an employee’s initial donation. Matching gifts are a special win-win for donors, who get to see their contribution go twice as far, and nonprofits, who receive twice as many donations from a single ask (thanks, matching gifts!).
Of course, tracking and recognizing matching gifts is a bit more complex than a single donation. The good news is that NPSP has got you covered.
Identify and Track Matching Organizations
To set up the management of matching gifts in NPSP, start by entering and tracking the companies that provide matching gifts. NPSP has an out-of-the-box section on the organization account layout with several fields to help you track information about companies that have matching gift programs including Matching Gift Percent, Annual Employee Max, Matching Gift Amount Max, Matching Gift Email, and others.
Let's rejoin our No More Homelessness (NMH) Development Associate Sofia as she edits the Cloud Kicks account record to track Cloud Kicks as a matching company. Sofia simply opens the account record and checks the Matching Gift Company option in the Matching Gift Information section.
Sofia entered some other information in this section as well—the company's matching gift percentage, the gift administrator’s contact information, deadline information, and so on. None of these fields are required for using matching gifts, but selecting Matching Gift Company makes identifying these companies much easier in list views and reports.
Create the Matching-Eligible Gift
Now let's step through the process of creating the employee's donation and its match. Remember Candace Evans, NMH's dedicated volunteer, advocate, and donor? Well Candace is also an employee of Cloud Kicks, and Cloud Kicks is going to match the $100 donation she made to NMH (woohoo!). She let NMH know this when she donated. And Candace needs to communicate this, because accurately tracking a matching gift in NPSP begins with the individual donor's gift—the gift that will be matched.
Follow along in your own org as Sofia enters Candace's donation as a new opportunity record.
1. Navigate to the employee's contact record.
2. Click on the Related tab, scroll down to the Opportunities related list and click New.
3. Indicate that the Matching Gift Account is the employee's company. (You can use the lookup field to find the account in Salesforce.) In this example, Sofia enters Cloud Kicks.
4. Mark the Matching Gift Status as Potential or Submitted (You may need to review the company's matching gift policies to see if there is additional work you need to do to receive the match).
5. Save the new donation.
Now, we wait. When the match comes in, we'll create the matching gift from the company.
Create the Matching Gift from the Company
Weeks later, a check for $100 arrives from Cloud Kicks indicating it's a matching gift for Candace's donation. Again, let’s follow along as Sofia enters the matching gift:
1. Navigate to the appropriate account record.
2. Click New on the Opportunities Related list to create a new donation record.
3. Select Matching Gift as the record type. Click Next.
4. Complete the details in the gift as you typically would for an organization donation; you're not entering any matching details quite yet.
5. Save the record.
6. On the Opportunities related list, click the name of the new opportunity just created.
7. In the upper right corner of the opportunity record, click Find Matched Gifts. NPSP lists any unmatched closed/won opportunities that specify Cloud Kicks as the Matching Account.
8. Select the opportunities that should be matched to this donation, and make sure the total matches what you expect.
9. Click Save.
Salesforce calculates the total matching gift amount automatically, based on the Matching Gift Percent field you've specified on the account record. If you leave that field blank, Salesforce automatically uses the opportunity amount instead. For example, if the company matches at 200%, a donor would be credited $100 for an original gift of $50. You can adjust this amount later if you don't want to use the default value.
Now you can see the matched gifts on the related tab of both Opportunity records:
So that's all fine in a world where donors are perfect, but what happens when the donor doesn't give you a heads-up that their company will match their gift? Good news, you can still find those donations and connect them to a company's matching gift in NPSP.
Let's imagine that Cloud Kicks sends you another check, this time a $50 matching gift for Erica Douglass. However, Erica didn't mention that she worked for Cloud Kicks when she made the original gift so Sofia wasn't able to mark it as a potential matched gift.
Let's follow along as Sofia connects Erica's lonely donation with its rightful match:
1. Create the opportunity from the company using the matching gift record type.
2. Click Find Matched Gifts. Because Sofia didn't mark the original donation from Erica Douglass as a potential or submitted matching gift, the interface is blank. But no worries! She can still find the original donation.
3. Click Find More Gifts.
4. In the Find More Gifts dialog box, enter as much as you know about the gift and click Search. (Tip: Enter search criteria that will return as few results as possible. Don't search for all gifts in 2019 to match against, for example.) Salesforce adds potential Opportunities to the list so you can select the ones that apply.
5. Sofia selects Erica Douglass's Opportunity record and clicks Save.
The individual original gifts are listed in the Matched Gifts related list. Back on the Cloud Kicks account related lists, you'll see some new information:
If Sofia clicks into the $50 Matching Gift, she'll see that a contact role has been automatically created for the matched donor—Erica Douglass—with the role that's specified for matching gift donors. (Existing contact roles will not be overwritten by a matching gift role if the matched donor already has a contact role.)
With matching gifts, you may notice that soft credit is assigned via what we call partial soft credits. You don't really have to worry about that right now, because the partial soft credit rolls up on the contact record just like every other soft credit. NPSP uses partial soft credits for matching gifts just in case the company sends you one big check and you have to assign soft credits to multiple donors. We'll talk more about partial soft credits in the next unit.
Back on the original donation (opportunity) record, Salesforce updated the Matching Gift Status to Received and linked the Matching Gift field to the company's matching gift.
On Erica's contact record, you can now see a hard credit for the $50 donation and $50 in soft credit for the matching gift!
Remember that you won't see soft credits reflected on the contact record immediately. You either need to wait overnight for the calculations to happen automatically, ask your admin to manually run a rollup batch update, or use the recalculate rollups button.
So not only is NPSP part data wonk and part relationship guru, but it is also part matchmaker! We'll continue to see how NPSP supports and extends the use of soft credits in our next unit as we dig into how your organization might use partial soft credits.