Hi everyone,
I've posted on the Impact Exchange hoping to get some assistance with this, but I also wanted to ask the community to get more eyes on my problem. I am to the point of overthinking this problem to the point that I can't make a decision to move forward. Essentially I am having trouble figuring out how to accurately report on major donors who give through multiple entities — their household plus one or more personal businesses/LLCs — in NPSP. I'm trying to get an accurate combined giving for the primary contact without breaking lapsed-donor reporting or requiring a lot of manual upkeep. Curious what's worked for others (Account Hierarchy, Contact-level rollups, something else). I am having trouble make soft credit work for my needs.
Here is the description of my Impact Exchange project for more context:
neverthirst is a nonprofit running on Salesforce NPSP (Household Account model), with a growing base of major donors who give through multiple entities — their personal household account plus one or more owned businesses (LLCs, foundations, etc.), sometimes four or five per person. We need to reliably report each donor's total giving across every entity they touch, for major-donor stewardship, lapsed-donor tracking, and Top-Donor reporting — without a donor falsely showing as "lapsed" just because they gave through a different business account than last year.
I've prototyped two approaches and want an outside expert to pressure-test the direction and help us build it out properly: (1) NPSP Account Hierarchy, with businesses as child accounts under a household parent, rolled up via custom fields — functional, but dependent on manually maintaining the hierarchy every time a donor's business gives for the first time, and it breaks down when two people co-own the same business and both need full credit. (2) A Primary Contact + soft/hard credit model using NPSP's native rollup fields — less manual maintenance, but a bigger restructuring effort.
Looking for someone with hands-on NPSP experience specifically with multi-entity/household+business donor attribution, who can help us pick (or improve) an architecture, build the supporting rollups and reports, and leave us with documentation our (small, non-technical) team can maintain going forward. Comfortable with an iterative, hands-on engagement rather than a one-time consult — this needs someone in the weeds with us.
for us Opportunity Contact Roles were the key. We essentially set ourselves up with two sets of rollups. One set for hard-credits and one for soft-credits. We defined our various filter groups in NPSP Settings > Customizable Rollups to support the various rollups we wanted to create.
For example, our Opps Won Hard Credit filter group only includes opportunities with an amount greater than $0, that are Closed Won, are classified as donations (we use a formula checkbox field for this), and where the Contact Role is 'Donor'. Our Opps Won Soft Credit filter group is essentially the same thing, but the Contact Role must be Soft Credit or Household Member.
We have a handful of other filter groups that target open pledges, pledge payments, write-offs, etc.
Our Contact Role settings in NPSP have 'Contact Role for Individual Opps' set to 'Donor' and 'Contact Role for Organizational Opps' set to 'Soft Credit'. We did not enable 'Always Rollup to Primary Contact Role' because if someone if giving through a business we don't want that to roll up to them as a hard credit. We want that to roll up as a hard credit to the business only, and the person to receive a soft credit even if they are the primary contact. You are obviously free to enable to disable this depending on what you need.Once those filters groups & settings are set up, you can create/edit your custom rollups using those filters. For example, our "Last Gift Date" uses the Opps Won Hard Credit filter while "Last Soft Credit Date" uses the Opps Won Soft Credit filter.
Once you have all these numbers and dates rolling up to individuals (we also have rollups for accounts by the way), you can easily show what you need either in a report, chart, or even in a formula field that incorporates and compares rollups if you want to give users a single data point to look at before digging into more details.
