Do household members’ automatic contact roles become Gift Soft Credits?

The mechanism matters here: NPSP automatically gives every member of a household a contact role on each household gift. Nobody typed those roles in; they are plumbing. If migration converts them all into Gift Soft Credits, the target fills with recognition records nobody deliberately created — and household recognition reports count them as if a human had decided each one. That is the silent inflation this decision exists to prevent: recommended practice routes only the roles NPSP’s own settings designate as soft credits, and rebuilds household-level recognition from household membership, where it actually lives in the new model.

The counter-case is operational, not technical: some fundraising teams have built recognition societies, stewardship tiers or donor-wall logic directly on household members’ soft credits, and those reports would need redesign if the automatic roles stop arriving. If that is you, migrating them is a defensible recorded choice — made with eyes open about what the counts will mean. Either way, test the outcome the way a donor would experience it: pick three real households, work out by hand what recognition each member should show, and compare against a trial load. Recognition is one of the few data categories donors personally notice; it deserves a hand check.

When Horus Eye assesses an NPSP org, this question is raised with the evidence the scan saw — the record types, fields and settings behind it — its recommendation marked, and the reasons stated. Accept records the recommendation; Change opens the options. Recording an answer writes nothing to Salesforce: it is captured in the decision register, with who decided and when, and the migration plan, mappings and documents are kept consistent with what your organization actually decided. Horus Eye recommends; your organization decides.

• 1. Salesforce Help · Capture Giving Influence with Soft Credits — What Gift Soft Credits are for in the target model. ↩︎
• 2. Salesforce · Agentforce Nonprofit Migration Guide v2.0 (PDF) — The official guide this content follows: platform differences, migration recommendations, and how NPSP features map to Agentforce Nonprofit. ↩︎

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