How Do I Acknowledge Passthrough Gifts?

Now that you've entered some gifts (including some with passthrough givers), it's time to think about receipts and acknowledgments.

First, it's important to recognize the difference between the two:

• Receipts are sent to Contacts who have given directly to your organization.
  • For example, if you receive a check from The Human Fund, log the gift on The Human Fund's record and receipt accordingly. 
  • This also applies to those who have made qualified charitable contributions (IRA gifts). See this article for more information on acknowledging these gifts.
• Acknowledgments may be sent to Contacts who have given through another entity. 
  • For example, if you receive a check from The Human Fund and know it was triggered by Janis Ian, who has a donor-advised fund with The Human Fund:
    • Log the gift on The Human Fund's record, entering Janis Ian as the passthrough giver. Then, send a receipt to The Human Fund (if they have indicated they would like to receive communications). 
    • In addition, you may consider sending Janice Ian an acknowledgment. This is not a formal tax receipt, but rather a way of showing appreciation for Janis Ian for giving through her donor-advised fund. 

Receipts can be generated from the Virtuous receipting tool and executed on direct gifts (not passthrough gifts).

When it comes to acknowledgments, Virtuous allows you to retrieve the information you need to send them, but the acknowledgments themselves will need to be generated outside of Virtuous. 

It is important to note that acknowledgments like this are treated separately from receipts because the donor may receive tax deduction benefits when they contribute to the organization that sponsors their donor advised fund, so they are not eligible to receive those benefits from your organization also.

Additionally, separating gifts from passthrough gifts allows for separate contact and combined contact statistics - in other words, you can look at a donor's direct giving, passthrough giving, or direct plus passthrough giving. 

How to Find the Information You Need

1. Create a Gift Query. 
2. Specify a Gift Date range.
3. Select the "Passthrough" field and "Is set" for the operator. This helps to narrow down only those gifts that have a passthrough giver.
4. Specify any other fields relevant to the types of passthrough gifts you would like to acknowledge.
5. View results. 
6. Select all the gifts in your results. 
7. Click "Download CSV" to download your CSV file. 

When you select fields to include in your CSV file, be sure to include (at minimum):

• Gift information like:
  • Gift Amount
  • Gift Date
• Passthrough Contact information:
  • Passthrough Contact Name
  • Passthrough Contact Informal Name
  • Passthrough Primary Full Address

This will provide the basic information you'll need to use mail merge and generate your own acknowledgments.