Positioning Your Organization for Transformational Gifts - The Magic Bullet

Every nonprofit struggles with its annual budget process.

“I wish we had an investment fund that let us think strategically!”

“If only we had an endowment to draw on!” 

“If we could just plan more than one year at a time, we’d be such better stewards of our assets and staff!”

It’s a common theme, and if these are thoughts expressed at your finance committee or board meetings, you are not alone.

After years of working with both donors and nonprofits, I can tell you there IS a magic bullet: planning giving. A “planned gift” is a gift a donor makes as a bequest through an estate or will. After family members are designated as beneficiaries, many givers also choose to leave a life insurance benefit, a piece of property or a percentage of their entire estate to a charity.  

Planned gifts are transformational gifts for several reasons. For the donor, this will typically be the largest gift they will ever be able to make. Planned gifts can be exponentially larger than any one-time or annual gift a donor could give during his or her lifetime. 

For those seeking to leave a legacy, this is an opportunity to designate significant funding to a beloved cause. An estate gift can often be more funds than an organization has ever received at one time. These gifts can become the seed funding for endowments. For many nonprofits, the annual distribution on invested endowed gifts are a major source of revenue in their operations budget or are used to fund their capital improvements. 

In this blog series, we’re going to explore the key ways you can best position your organization for planned giving. We’ll unpack how to educate your audiences about planned gifts, communicate the ways you would use and manage a large donation, and build a strategy for a long-term invested endowment for your programs. 

We’ll also address the elephant in the room on this subject: why so many donors may not feel comfortable leaving a large gift. Too often, nonprofit charities do not seem prepared to manage it. I really want to outline why I hear this so often and how you can proactively work to change that perception for your organization.

A nonprofit that secures estate gifts will be able to build a fund to sustain its operations, facilities, staff and important projects. It provides stability during lean times along with the flexibility to be creative and strategic in seeking how to best advance the mission. 

The next installments of this series, we’ll talk about specific education and communication strategies and how to best make your case to donors for inclusion in their estate plans.

Tim Smith