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Overview

A soft credit links a donor to a gift they didn’t directly make the payment on — for example, crediting the individual behind a company’s donation, or crediting a household member for another member’s gift. This article covers when soft credits are created, because the answer surprises a lot of organizations: it’s never automatic.

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Soft credits require a manual action or an import — always

WeGive does not create soft credit records automatically as a side effect of any donation or checkout flow. This is true no matter how the gift arrives — a standard one-time donation, a recurring charge, an event ticket purchase, or a gift disbursed through a donor advised fund (DAF) sponsor such as National Christian Foundation, Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, or DAFgiving360. There are only two ways a soft credit is ever created:
  1. A manual dashboard action. A staff member adds a soft credit to an existing payment from the dashboard, specifying the amount, the donor to credit, and the transaction.
  2. A CSV or batch import. Soft credits can be set per row (or as a batch-wide default) when importing offline gifts — see Batch Payment Import. Note that soft credits brought in this way are insert-only: an import can create a new soft credit, but cannot be used to bulk-update an existing one.

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Why this matters for DAF-disbursed gifts specifically

Gifts disbursed from a donor advised fund sponsor don’t flow through WeGive’s checkout at all — they’re entered as offline gifts (see Batch Payment Import). Because of that, there’s no automatic step anywhere in the pipeline that would soft-credit the grant’s recommending individual donor. If your organization wants the individual behind a DAF-routed grant credited, set that person as the soft credit on the row (or as the batch default) when you import the gift — the same way you would for any other offline or organization-level gift. It will not happen on its own.

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Practical implication

If you give (or receive a gift) as an organization or DAF sponsor, don’t expect the individual behind that gift to be automatically soft-credited. Plan to add the soft credit yourself, either one at a time from the dashboard or as part of your batch import, for every gift where that attribution matters to your reporting.
Last modified on October 7, 2026