Learn About Soft Credits

When someone helps bring a donation to your organization (whether by making introductions or inspiring a matching gift), they deserve recognition for their role! Soft credits are a widely used concept in nonprofit fundraising that makes this possible.

What is a soft credit?

Every donation in MonkeyPod has a donor of record who is the person or organization who actually made the gift. That's the "hard credit." A soft credit additionally attributes that gift to someone who played a meaningful role in making it happen, without changing the donor of record or affecting your financial records.

Example: a board member spends months cultivating a relationship that results in a $10,000 gift. The donor gets the hard credit for financial and tax purposes — but the board member's effort made it possible. A soft credit lets you record that contribution so you can see the full picture of that board member's impact, not just their own giving.

Soft credits are purely a relationship management and fundraising tracking tool. They have no effect on your accounting, and they don't generate a receipt or tax acknowledgment for the soft-credited person.

Why do soft credits matter?

Strong relationships are at the heart of effective fundraising, and that includes relationships with the people who help you raise money — not just the donors themselves. Soft credits help you:

Recognize the right people. Give credit to board members, volunteers, staff, and advocates who work to bring in support, even when they aren't the donor of record.
See the full picture. Get a complete view of how a person contributes to your organization's success — beyond their own personal giving.
Steward key relationships. When you can see who has been instrumental in bringing in gifts, you can make sure those people feel appreciated and stay engaged.
Track board giving and getting. For organizations using Board HQ, soft credits count toward a board member's "Get" goal, helping you measure the full scope of their fundraising contribution.

What soft credits don't do

Soft credits don’t affect financial reporting—they’re simply a way to track and thank the people who influenced a donation.

They don't affect your financial records. A soft credit creates no accounting entries and won't appear in your financial reports.
They don't generate a receipt or tax acknowledgment. Only the donor of record receives acknowledgment of their gift for tax purposes. The soft-credited person receives no receipt.
They're excluded from the Year-End Giving Summary report. Since this report is designed to help donors with their tax filing, soft credits are intentionally omitted.
They're excluded from email merge tags for calendar year total giving. Again, since these are for tax purposes, only actual gifts are included.

Common use cases for soft credits

Not sure when to use a soft credit? Here are some of the most common scenarios:

Matching gifts. A donor gives $1,000, and their employer matches it with an additional $1,000 donation. The employer's matching gift is recorded as a separate donation from the employee. The original donor can then be soft-credited on the employer's gift, reflecting the fact that their donation is what triggered the match. More on this below.
Staff or volunteer champions. A development staff member spends months cultivating a relationship that results in a significant planned gift commitment. A soft credit on that gift acknowledges their stewardship work in your records.
Gifts from Donor Advised Funds. For these gifts, the granting institution is the donor, and the donor advisor (who you'd likely consider your supporter) gets the soft credit. Learn more about how to handle DAF gifts here.
Peer-to-peer fundraising. You organize a walk-a-thon and each participant has their own personal fundraising page. When someone donates through a participant's page, the participant can be automatically soft-credited for that gift — recognizing their role in bringing in that support. See Learn About Peer-to-Peer Fundraising for details.

Where can I control how soft credits are used in my MonkeyPod?

You can control how soft credits factor into giving totals across your MonkeyPod. From the main menu, choose My MonkeyPod > Organization Settings. Then select the Relationships tab and you’ll find soft credits under the Fundraising heading.

When this setting is set to Yes (the default), soft credit amounts are included in a person's lifetime and annual giving totals on relationship records, searches and reports. When it's off, soft credits are still recorded and visible on individual gifts, but they aren't counted in giving totals.

How do I enter soft credits?

Recording a donation, pledge, or grant

When you manually record a donation, pledge, pledge payment, or a grant in MonkeyPod, you have the option to assign a soft credit to any relationship in your MonkeyPod. Look for Soft Credit under the "Optional" heading when recording any of those transactions. You can add more than one soft credit per gift — for example, to recognize both a board member who made the introduction and a staff member who cultivated the relationship over time.

Where can I tracking soft credits?

When a soft credit has been entered for a donation, it shows up directly on the donation page right after the donor's name.

Soft credits are also included in the following places in your MonkeyPod:

Soft Credit report

The Soft Credit report, found in the Reports menu under "Fundraising", gives you a dedicated view of all soft credits across your organization. It shows one row per soft credit with columns for the soft-credit recipient, date, amount, the hard-credit donor, and the fund or account. You can filter by date range and entity type, and export the report with additional relationship data columns (like address and email) appended — making it easy to pull a mailing list for acknowledgment letters.

Contribution Details report

Your Contribution Details report has the option of displaying and exporting soft credits. Soft credit amounts may be included in a person's giving totals, depending on your organization's soft credit settings (see below).

Board HQ — Give or Get tracking

If your organization uses the Board HQ app and tracks board member "Give or Get" goals, soft credits are factored into the "Get" side of the equation. A board member who helps bring in gifts gets credit toward their goal. See Learn About the Board HQ App for details.

Relationship records

Soft credits are listed on the soft-credited person's relationship page in two places:

Soft Credits tab: At the bottom of their relationship page, the Soft Credits tab lists every gift for which they've been given a soft credit. Use the Download button to export all the relationship's soft credits.
Interactions: Each soft credit also appears in the person's interaction history, listed as a donation with "soft credit" in parentheses.

The relationship page for the donor with the hard credit will also show soft credit details on the Transaction tab. Be sure to check the option for Soft Credit as one of the columns to show there.

The Contributions card and Giving Analytics card on a relationship record include an "Include soft credits" toggle, so you can quickly see giving totals with or without soft credits factored in. The default follows your organization's soft credit setting (see below).

Interaction Search

You can search for the term "soft credit" in your MonkeyPod's Interaction Feed. This can be really handy if you want to find all soft credits received during a specific time period and/or filter them by tag (such as finding all soft credits related to this year's spring fundraiser).

How can my MonkeyPod help me track soft credit acknowledgements?

If your organization tracks thank-you letters, soft credit recipients can be acknowledged independently from the hard-credit donor. On the donation page, you'll see a row for each soft-credited person alongside the donor, and each can be marked as sent, skipped, or not yet sent.

Soft credit recipients also appear in the Thank You Letters report (Reports > Thank You Letters). They're identified by the "Soft Credit" badge that appears in the Transaction column.

How do soft credits work with matching gifts?

Matching gifts deserve special attention, because they involve two separate donations and two separate relationships with soft credits as the tool for connecting them.

Here's the recommended approach:

Record the original donation from the donor as you normally would.
Record the matching gift as a separate donation from the employer or foundation that is making the match. This is important because the matching gift is its own financial transaction, made by a different entity, and should be recorded as such.
Assign a soft credit on the employer's matching gift to the original donor, to reflect that their gift is what triggered the match.

This approach keeps your accounting clean and accurate, ensures the right entity is given a correct receipt for each gift, and gives the original donor appropriate recognition for the full impact of their giving.

Can donors view their soft credits from their Community Portal?

Soft credits can also appear in a donor's own community portal if you opt to turn on this setting and give them visibility into gifts they helped bring in, even when they aren't the donor of record.

For example, say a donor recommends a $1000 gift from her donor advised fund at Greater Horizons. The gift is recorded from Greater Horizons and is soft-credited to Kela. At that point, she can log into her community portal and see it listed alongside her own gifts. Since the donor wasn't the actual donor for tax purposes, the gift is labeled a "third-party gift" and doesn't include an option to request a receipt.

This visibility is off by default. If you'd like donors to see their soft credits in the Community Portal, go to My MonkeyPod > Organization Settings and select the Public Facing Pages tab. In the Community Portal section, turn on Yes, show third-party gifts.

Once enabled:

Labeling: Soft-credited gifts appear in the donor's giving history as a third-party gift, showing the name of the actual donor of record (for example, "Third-party gift by Greater Horizons (DAF)").
Giving totals: These amounts show up in the Total Giving by Year summary, listed separately as third-party gifts, so donors can see their full impact without confusing it with their own tax-deductible giving.
Receipts: Donors cannot request a receipt for a third-party gift, since they aren't the donor of record and the gift isn't theirs for tax purposes.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is a soft credit different from householding?

These two features are sometimes confused, but they serve different purposes. Householding links individual relationship records into a household unit, and can aggregate giving totals at the household level, which is useful for understanding giving patterns within a family, for example. A soft credit, on the other hand, attributes a gift to someone who helped bring it in, regardless of their relationship to the donor. A soft credit doesn't link records or affect how giving totals are calculated.

Will the soft-credited person show up in my fundraising reports?

Soft credits are generally excluded from standard fundraising reports, which are based on the donor of record. You can use the dedicated Soft Credit report in the Reports menu to see soft credit activity, or choose to display the "Soft Credit" column in the Contribution Details report to see soft credits tied to donations there.

Can I see all of the gifts someone has been soft-credited for?

Yes! Navigate to that person's relationship page and select the Soft Credits tab at the bottom. You'll see a complete list of every gift they've been soft-credited for.

Can I apply multiple soft credits to one donation?

Yes! You can add as many soft credits as needed to a single gift to recognize everyone who played a meaningful role.