Experience.FellowshipOne.com

We have several church members who support the church using gifts through a "Charitable Gift Fund." The Charitable Fund (i.e. Fidelity) sends a check to the church at the direction of the donor, i.e."John Doe". John Doe has previously made a gift to the Charitable Gift Fund, which constitutes his charitable donation. The check we receive is from the Charitable Gift Fund, and is not deductible to the individual church member, nor is it a deductible contribution to the Charitable Gift Fund.

My question is how to handle this gift within F1 Contributions? This check would be processed through our normal procedures, i.e. scanning the check and posting to an account. however, I would like to notate the gift to the actual church family who directed the contribution... Has anyone had experience with this? How did you handle this in F1?

Here is the answer I received from our Finance Dept:

I scan the check, and attribute it to the foundation that sent the check. That is all that we do in F1.

Then we make a copy of the letter enclosed, and every few months I take those copies, and mail out an acknowledgement letter to them, and file away a copy.

In Him,

---

Debbie Doell
Fellowship One Coordinator
Cornerstone Fellowship 348 North Canyons Parkway Livermore, CA 94551
www.cornerstoneweb.org

As I think through this a bit, I'd like to see F1 offer an enhancement that would allow "affiliated" donors be aggregated for reporting purposes. So, for example, if a family has a charitable foundation, and the family controls/directs gifts for that foundation, then F1 could "link" those donor accounts for use with certain reports. This would allow the church to run reports that give the "true" value of gifts that a given family/household controls.

I follow the same procedure as noted above.  My problem comes when the church's senior management requests statistics by donor regarding the number and size of gifts.  There is not any way to tie multiple donations sent through a foundation to be linked to the original donor for statistical purposes.  Currently I can only link them to a foundation who routes many contributions from many donors to the church in a year.  If someone has a solution for this, please let me know.  I can not link the gift to the original donor because then it will be added to their contribution statement.

I don't think that we have actually run into this, but has anyone thought about creating a "receipt" fund that the original donor's gift would be recorded in?  It seems like that would provide tracking, but wouldn't show up as deductable.

I wish that I could follow your suggestion.  Unfortunately, this would cause our Fellowship One fund totals to get ouit of step with our General Ledger totals which would make our church's auditors very unhappy.

We also receive multiple members who donate through gift funds, foundations and stock donations.  We treat all of these gifts the same and process these as a non-cash gift.  We also send a letter acknowledging the gift.  By processing the gifts as a non-cash, allows the donor to know that we received the funds on their statement (no dollar amount is shown) and the funds will post to the designations they have directed.  We currently are in the middle of a pledge drive and entering these as a non-cash gift reduces the pledge commitment if they have directed the gift to their pledge.  This also allows for proper lead staff reports when needed.  If the charitable organization sends tax information that is the documentation they will use for tax purposes.

So, do you scan the checks using the F1 scanner for a photocopy, or do you enter them in the manual Add Contribution screen? Thanks. Diane