Fix Automatic Reciprocal Soft Credit Settings on Constituent Relationships
Inspired by this community thread: https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/313334#Comment_313334
When configuring relationship records in Raiser’s Edge NXT web view, enabling automatic soft crediting on one side of a relationship also causes the reciprocal relationship to be automatically marked for soft crediting—even when that is not the user’s intent.
These settings should function independently.
While this issue can affect any relationship type, it is especially problematic for organizational-to-individual relationships, such as Donor Advised Funds, family foundations, or corporate giving records, where reciprocal soft crediting is often inappropriate and can create significant data inaccuracies. In many spouse-to-spouse relationships this may be less disruptive, but for institutional and organizational records it introduces serious concerns.
This behavior can result in:
Inaccurate giving and soft credit reports
Donor recognition and stewardship errors
Misleading relationship data
Increased administrative burden through manual audits and corrections
Database view currently allows these settings to function independently, which better supports the varied needs of fundraising teams.
Users need full control over whether each side of a relationship should trigger soft crediting, rather than having the system assume reciprocal intent.
Requested Fix:
Allow soft credit settings on each side of a relationship to be configured independently, without automatically mirroring selections on the reciprocal relationship record.
This change would improve flexibility, preserve data integrity, and better support the diverse relationship structures organizations manage.
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Elizabeth Johnson ⭐ Community All-Star
- May 1 2026
- Reviewed: Voting Open
Related ideas
Also - have the ability to soft credit spouses differently. We need the ability to have household giving history without having the add a soft credit to the spouse which isn't always applicable.
I've had to do a lot of clean-up in client databases because the assumption of most users is that the checkbox would function the same as it does in DBV. I echo everything Elizabeth said. This is unexpected behavior and should be fixed.
This is concerning, because it's an entirely different behaviour from how soft credits work in DB view. Organizations have built processes around using soft credits to only be one way in certain circumstances, but two way in others- always having it go both ways creates confusion, deviates from existing processes and will lead to confusion in relationships set up in DB view and their soft credits vs those set up in webview.