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.
Thank you both for your response! This definitely had me digging more into soft credits and how they are designed to work. Doing a little bit of arguing with Gemini because it was confusing me more. Thank you in advance for continuing on this journey with me.
After reading through responses, I'm still not settled on a plan. Please read my responses and then below you'll see my ultimate needs at the end.
@Himanshu Shekhar :I was following right along until you mentioned using soft credit as the way to attribute everything. The native NPSP is to give the contact the hard credit if it’s a household gift and I would prefer to stick with that instead of changing up the native structure. I see how that would help for lapsed logic, but I don’t think it would be helpful overall. I’ve also not been able to truly understand what the ‘Always Roll Up to Primary Contact Role’ checkbox truly accomplishes. It appears that Salesforce does not recommend using this checkbox as best practice.
What did you create that wasn’t already out of the box with npsp settings?
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There are two big things I am ultimately trying to accomplish:
1. I think the biggest struggle for me comes when my users ask for "
a list" with a certain criteria, because technically there are two (maybe more) lists to accurately portray their "list." It could make sense to have a contact list and an account list, but there will be overlap of some sort.I tried to solve this by pulling an
account report and grouping by primary contact. A lot of the time this works to show the contact and the accounts they are involved in, but random outliers come in.- What if there's not a primary contact? Should I create a dummy contact for business that don't have a contact? If I try to group by primary contact, then all the accounts without a primary contact are grouped together.
2. I have a specific use case where I need a currency field to trigger a task based on the amount, but I need it to encompass total value for current year. This could mean (1)total personal gifts for contacts who give by household only, (2)total personal gifts and business gifts for contacts who give by household and the business they own, and (3)total personal gifts for contact who give by household, but may have soft credit from account affiliations. Maybe I need a checkbox for business owner and roll up field that combines hard and soft credits when it's checked, but just hard otherwise? But what about those affiliated soft credits? And where would this field live? On contact or account?