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.
Connect Matching Gifts
Another 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 win-win for donors who get to see their contribution go twice as far, and nonprofits who receive twice as much money from a single gift.
Of course, tracking and recognizing matching gifts is more complex than a single donation. The good news is that NPSP handles this with built-in tools.
Identify and Track Matching Organizations
To set up matching gift management in NPSP, start by entering and tracking the companies that provide matching gifts.
NPSP has a default section on the organization account page layout with several fields to help you track information about companies that have matching gift programs. The fields in this section include Matching Gift Percent, Annual Employee Max, Matching Gift Amount Max, Matching Gift Email, and others.
For example, Cloud Kicks, a shoe company, has a matching gift program. No More Homelessness (NMH) Development Associate Sofia needs to edit the Cloud Kicks account record to track the company’s program. Sofia opens the account record and selects the Matching Gift Company option in the Matching Gift Information section.
Sofia enters 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 a Matching-Eligible Gift
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. Candace 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 as Sofia enters Candace's donation as a new opportunity record.
- Click Opportunities in navigation.
- Click New.
- Select Donation and click Next.
- Specify the required details, and scroll down to the Matching Gift Information section to specify these details.
- Matching Gift Account: Find and select the account of Candace’s employer.
- Matching Gift Status: Select either 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.
- Matching Gift Account: Find and select the account of Candace’s employer.
- Save your work.
Now, Sofia waits. When the match comes in, she’ll create the matching gift from the company.
Create a Matching Gift from a Company
Later, a check for $100 arrives from Cloud Kicks indicating it's a matching gift for Candace's donation.
Follow along as Sofia enters the matching gift.
- Click Opportunities in navigation.
- Click New.
- Select Matching Gift and click Next.
- Complete the details in the gift as you typically would for an organization donation. You're not entering any matching details quite yet.
- Specify the required details. By default, you don’t specify any matching information here yet.
- Save your work.
- In quick actions on the opportunity, find and select Find Matched Gifts. It may be under
.
- On the Find Matched Gifts, NPSP lists any unmatched Closed Won opportunities with the same account in the Matching Account field. Find and select the matching opportunity.
- Save your work.
Now you can see the matched gifts on the related tab of both Opportunity records.
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.
But what happens when a donor doesn't tell you 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.
Imagine that Cloud Kicks sends you another check, this time a $50 matching gift for Erica Douglass. 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.
Here’s how Sofia connects Erica's lonely donation with its rightful match.
- Create a matching gift opportunity record as you did before, then select Find Matched Gifts.
- On the Find Matched Gifts page, click Find More Gifts.
- In the Find More Gifts box, enter as much as you know about the gift and click Search. Enter search criteria that will return as few results as possible. Don't search for all gifts in 2019 to match against, for example.
- NPSP adds potential opportunities to the Find Matching Gifts list. Select the appropriate gifts.
- Save your work.
The individual original gifts are listed in the Matched Gifts related list.
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, soft credit is assigned via partial soft credits. 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. You learn more about partial soft credits in the next unit.
Back on the original 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, there’s a hard credit for the $50 donation and $50 in soft credit for the matching gift.
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.
Now that you understand matching gifts, you can continue on to learn how NPSP supports and extends the use of soft credits. In the next unit, you learn how your organization might use partial soft credits.