Deep Dive into Donor Advised Funds and Family Foundation Credits

It’s normal to feel unsure about managing Donor Advised Fund (DAF) or Family Foundation gifts in Salesforce Agentforce Nonprofit (aka Nonprofit Cloud aka NPC). Questions like “Who is the money really coming from?” and “How should the gift get credited?” come up all the time. In this post, we’ll walk through Arkus’ recommended approach to setting things up clearly and consistently. Note: Salesforce has updated the name of their platform to include Agentforce as a descriptive term, so know that when we mention Agentforce here we are still talking about the core CRM functionality many people refer to as Salesforce and not the newer externally-facing chat Agent capabilities. 

Please be sure you evaluate these recommendations with your finance team and auditors, before making any significant updates to setup that can impact fundraising and financial reporting.

While these instructions are specifically written for Agentforce Nonprofit (NPC), the underlying concepts apply to most fundraising CRMs.

What is a DAF (or Family Foundation)?

People often give to nonprofit organizations through a Donor Advised Fund (DAF) or a family foundation. The donor gives money to the DAF or foundation and, tax and administrative reasons, the donor gives through those entities instead.

This can cause some confusion around processing gifts because of where the money is coming from. Who should get the hard credit and who should get the soft credit?

• Hard Credit - the donor of record for receipt, tax, and financial reporting purposes (i.e., the person who signed the check).
• Soft Credit - recognition for helping to secure the gift, but not the donor of record. Often given to board members or key contacts who influenced the donor to give. And, in this case the person behind the DAF or family foundation gift.

Best practices recommend that the entity (i.e. the DAF or family foundation) gets the hard credit and the related person gets the soft credit. Here’s an example of a creepy and kooky family foundation: 

• Gomez and Morticia Addams start the Addams Family Foundation.
• They contribute to their family foundation (this is the point where they’d get the tax credit)
• The family foundation contributes to the Nevermore Academy endowment 
• The Addams Family Foundation would get the hard credit
• Gomez or Morticia would get the soft credit

A DAF is a little different. While the family foundation is often managed by a family member (or someone hired by the family), a DAF is managed by a financial company such as Fidelity or Schwab. DAFs are solely for charitable contributions and funds can be invested for tax-free growth. The person connected to the DAF then advises the sponsoring organization which nonprofits should receive donations.

Advance Setup Checklist

There are some setup steps required before you start creating Gift Transactions and soft credits. Always test in a sandbox first! 

You need to make sure you can relate the family members to each other and to the DAF or foundation. Here are the setup steps for Agentforce Nonprofit (Nonprofit Cloud). These steps include setting up a household and Party Relationship Group for the Addams family. Both are required to roll up giving and engagement details to the household level.

1. Define Role picklist values on the Account Contact Relationship object - this will help you relate Gomez and Morticia to both their household Account and their family foundation account
2. Create Party Role Relationships for Contact Contact Relationships (e.g., Spouse-Spouse-CCR) - this allows you to relate Gomez and Morticia to each other which becomes visible in the Actionable Relationship Center (ARC).
3. In the Account Contact Relationship Object, add picklist values to determine how you want to identify members of the household. It could be as simple as “Household Member” or you may want to get more specific such as “Head of Household” and “Family Member”
4. In the same object, add picklist values to determine how you want to identify Contacts at the family foundation (e.g., “Primary Contact” for Gomez and “Secondary Contact” for Morticia)
5. Ensure there’s a “Household” value on the Type picklist on the Account object. This helps you easily identify and report on household accounts as they’re usually created using the “Organization” Account record type
6. Ensure there’s a “Family Foundation” (or “DAF”) value on the Type picklist on the Account object to easily identify organizations related to those specific types of entities
7. Define role picklist values on the Gift Soft Credit object (e.g., “Family Foundation Credit”) 
8. Review Data Processing Engine (DPE) calculations to understand the currently available calculations to understand how giving and recognition rollups behave. This step is best handled by your Salesforce administrator or implementation partner.

Build Sample Accounts and Relationships

You’ll see that we’re using Contact Contact Relationships to link Gomez and Morticia’s Person Accounts. Remember that a Person Account is both an Account and a Contact. While we’re technically linking the pair on the Contact level, you’ll be able to see the relationship on the Person Account in the ARC

1. Create a Person Account for Gomez Addams and another for Morticia Addams
2. Create Contact Contact Relationships between Morticia and Gomez to note they’re spouses
3. Create an Organization Account for the “Morticia and Gomez Addams Household”
4. Create a Party Relationship Group called “Addams Household PRG” (or similar) and look up to the Addams Family Household Account
5. Create an Organization Account for the “Addams Family DAF (via Fidelity)”
6. Set up Account Contact Relationships between Gomez and the Addams Family Household. Repeat for Morticia and the Addams Family Household. In both cases, use the roles you defined in step 3 in the above section
7. Set up Account Contact Relationships between Gomez and the Addams Family DAF Account. Repeat for Morticia and the Addams Family DAF Account. Use the roles you defined in step 4 in the Advanced Setup Checklist section above

Create Sample Gift Transactions and Gift Soft Credits

1. Create and save a Gift Transaction with “Addams Family DAF (via Fidelity)” as the donor. Be sure to set the Gift Type picklist value to Organization/Household
2. Create a related Gift Soft Credit
1. Set Gomez Addams (or Morticia) as the recipient.
2. Leave the Partial Percent and Amount fields blank to credit 100%
3. Select the appropriate role (e.g., “Family Foundation Credit”) as defined in step 7 of the Advanced Setup Checklist above
4. Save the Gift Soft Credit record
3. Let the DPE job run overnight and you’ll see the results on the Addams’ DAF Account record and the associated Person Account.

Bonus: Make Use of Parent Accounts for DAFs

Because DAFs are always associated with a financial institution, you can easily use the Parent Account lookup field on Account records to link all the DAF records to that institution. For example, above we used the fictional “Addams DAF (via Fidelity)”.

Create an Account for “Fidelity DAFs” using the Organization record type. Then, select Fidelity DAFs as the Parent Account of the Addams DAF (via Fidelity). Populate the Parent Account field for other DAFs. Now, when you open the Fidelity DAFs account, you can use the View Account Hierarchy button to view all DAFs related to Fidelity. 

Conclusion

DAFs and family foundations can feel complicated at first, but they don’t have to be. Once your structure clearly separates who gave the money from who inspired the gift, Salesforce becomes much easier to trust for receipts, recognition, and reporting. The goal of this setup isn’t just technical accuracy, it’s organizational clarity. Your finance team can rely on hard credits, your development team can recognize the right people, and leadership can see a more complete picture of donor influence.

With consistent data entry, managing DAFs and family foundations will start to feel routine rather than confusing. And that’s really the goal: your CRM shouldn’t create questions about your donors, it should help you understand and engage them better.

Let me know if you’d like advice for any specialized DAF or family foundation scenarios. You can find me on the Trailblazer Community at or on LinkedIn.