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.
Start with the crediting rules, not the rollups.
The hierarchy approach can work when one household connects to one business, but it gets risky when the same business needs to give credit to more than one person. Before building more fields or reports, define who should get credit, when they should get credit, and how that should affect lapsed-donor and top-donor reporting.
A good next step is to test those rules against a few real donor examples before choosing the final setup.
