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Since I started using CiviCRM about 5 years ago I've thought one of the biggest problem areas was related to tracking and searching for contributions based on household, which is generally how non-profit contributions should be tracked. It's been the source of many struggles at 2 or 3 orgs I have been associated with during this time.

Soft credits have helped to some degree, but require consistent and mistake-free work. A possibly very useful solution occurred to me last night - what if any time an individual makes a contribution it automatically soft-credited the household they are a member of?

Ideally it could be turned off and on and have the ability to control based on financial type.

Thoughts?

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  • This is great! Thank you. I will install the extension and see if it will work for us. I like the flexibility of rules and actions, but sounds like it's not necessary to pursue for this use case.
    – user3007
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 0:11
  • Not sure if "which is generally how non-profit contributions should be tracked" is that much of a general true-ism
    – petednz - fuzion ♦
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 3:14
  • Who doesn't track contributions by household? Would you consider a husband a non-contributor if his wife is the one who actually used her credit card for the contribution? Or would you ask one member of a household for $100 in a given fundraising campaign even if the other member regularly gives $10,000? I have worked at several non-profits and none didn't try track donations by family.
    – desierto
    Commented Mar 19, 2016 at 4:44
  • It's important to treat a family as one entity for fundraising purposes... it is the norm.
    – desierto
    Commented Mar 19, 2016 at 4:46

2 Answers 2

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Here is an extension that automatically creates a soft credit. I use it with my org and it works great. I'm running 4.7.2 with drupal 7.

https://github.com/PalanteJon/coop.palantetech.module.automaticsoftcredit

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It is a great idea. Using CiviRules, you could get a good bit of the way there out of the box. To set the soft credit though, you would need to (or pay someone to) write some code -- you'd have to code the CiviRule action.

For the formula, you'd set the trigger to "Contribution is added."

For the conditions, you could have a couple:

  • "Contribution is (not) of financial type ..." and you could set the type.
  • "Contact (not) in group" and you'd select a Smart group you created for people who are in a household (if you have contacts who are not in a household, you would need this check in the rules).

For the action, you would need to code it such that a soft credit is created for the household that is related to the contact that added the contribution. Or if you wanted to get a bit more flexible with it, you could code it such that the user could select the relationship that determines the soft credit.

CiviRules allows you to enable/disable a Rule as you see fit.

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  • Well, frTommy's solution (posted around the same time) looks like the better answer, but I'll leave this here for people who want to go the CiviRules route.
    – Allen Hutchison
    Commented Feb 24, 2016 at 21:22

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