More and more, the area of gift planning is becoming an important fundraising activity with Canadian charities. It allows donors to consider leaving a gift today and later in life, along with the tax implications of those gifts.

Whether you are thinking of starting a Planned Giving program or have recently implemented a new program, the following considerations will be key in ensuring its future success.

Develop effective gift acceptance policies

Creating policies at the outset of establishing your Planned Giving Program is very important. These policies will help provide guidance and assist in answering any future questions.

Gift acceptance policies are a list of procedures pertaining to your organization’s acceptance of a gift. They will protect the donor and will ensure your organization does its due diligence in determining whether they can accept the gift.

The policies will ensure that the gift makes sense for the donor in terms of their personal financial position, as well as their tax and estate plan. (Donors should always be encouraged to seek independent professional legal and financial advice). The gift also has to make sense for the charity on an after-cost basis. In addition, risk of liability to the board and its directors must be minimized.

Gift acceptance policies should be developed for all types of gifts with special attention to:

• Bequests, gifts of residue, testamentary trusts and other gifts through a Will
• Life insurance / donor owned and charity owned
• Publicly traded securities
• Charitable Remainder trust and other inter vivos (living) trusts
• Gifts of private company shares
• Outright gifts of real estate (including environmental risk policy)
• Gifts of life interest (residual)
• Gifts of RRSPs/RRIFs
• Annuities

Determine a way to measure and track your donor base

One of the most important long term assets a charity has is its knowledge and understanding of its donor base. As with most things in both for-profit and non-profit organizations, the success of the organization comes down to the relationships it builds between the organization (staff) and donors/clients. Accurate records of staff interactions with donors over the long term are the building blocks of good relationships.

An effective system for recording all paper, email and telephone interaction (and hopefully personal visits) with donors and professional advisors will allow charities to carry on meaningful relationships with these people over the long term and to withstand critical staff changes. Below are a few examples of what should be tracked:

• All interactions with donors: conversations, meetings, correspondence etc. with special care to record information that might identify the donor as a gift planning prospect. Include a note to follow up with the donor on a specific date.
• All interactions with professional advisors. Include a note to follow up with the advisor on a specific date.
• All estate administration-related correspondence and conversations with executors, lawyers and donor’s families.

Unlike cash donations that are easy to measure with an annual calculation, planned gifts are usually, though not always, gifts made now that will be realized in the future. It is important for the board and staff to have an accurate measurement of how the planned giving program is proceeding in the absence of hard dollars in the door by fiscal year end. The board needs to understand that success in terms of future realized bequests and other planned gifts will be a direct result of activities undertaken today. For reporting purposes, it is important to break down the components for measurement of activity leading to future gift planning successes:

• Bequest expectancies.
• Expectancies from other planned giving vehicles such as gifts of life insurance or trusts.
• Annual funds realized from bequests and other gifts through Wills — this can be done in a chart that is updated monthly with each active and open estate account recorded.
• Annual funds realized from other planned giving vehicles such as securities, life insurance or, trust income.
• Annual contacts with gift planning prospects — this is an important measurement of the level of active fundraising activity that is occurring in an organization and an indication of future success of the planned giving program.
• Annual contacts with confirmed planned giving donors — measure interactions with confirmed planned giving donors. The primary goal here is ongoing stewardship of the donor. A secondary goal would be to encourage future gift planning donors to also consider supporting your organization with current cash donations.
• Networking activity — all networking activity with professional advisors should be recorded on donor data software and reported on a monthly basis.

Collect good database information

Your organization is in a position to take advantage of the segmenting work that other charities have done with respect to determining which donors are most likely to become gift planning prospects and eventually confirmed bequest donors. Other charities have discovered through experience, donor focus groups and surveys that the following demographic make up the donors that are inclined to make a charitable gift through their Will. By focusing on this demographic, your organization can use its limited resources to effectively work with those donors most likely to have the ability and the desire to make planned gifts. The ideal prospective gift planning donor would combine more than one of the following attributes.

• Female, single
• Elderly
• Widowed with no children
• Children taken care of
• Grateful person
• Monthly donors
• Consistent donors
• Volunteers including board members
• Tribute donor

Ensure donor recognition

Recognition is very important but should be kept simple in small organizations, so it does not become too onerous for staff. The planned giving recognition policy must blend seamlessly with the overall donor recognition policy. If your organization does not have a general recognition policy, the first step would be to develop one, and then develop a separate but aligned recognition policy for planned gifts.

Create legacy marketing materials and initiatives

The first and most obvious step is to develop a list of donors who are the most likely to make a future gift to your organization. Once you have identified this list, you can set up a series of gentle reminders to engage the donors. These reminders can be in the form of:

• Sending regular correspondence in the form of newsletters, annual reports, community reports and hand written notes or letters (direct mail solicitations).
• One-on-one meetings, visits, tours, lunches, teas etc.
• Invitations to events that your organization sponsors such as seminars, major fundraising events, galas, golf tournaments.

Other marketing recommendations include:

• Develop a monthly giving option
• Develop marketing material and plans for planned gifts other than bequests
• Survey supporters
• Send periodic press releases to various media
• Self-Identification form
• Piggybacking on all current marketing materials
• Staff training re: bequest enquiries
• Develop bequest brochure

Find time for stewardship activity

Stewardship, the process of continued relationship building with established donors, is an important element of keeping donors committed and engaged. The value of stewardship to your organization cannot be underestimated. A well-developed stewardship program will keep established donors educated about the work that your organization does, keep them committed to the cause and connected to the organization through relationships with staff and volunteers.

Train volunteers

It is in your organization’s best interest to use volunteers to take up tasks that staff does not have time to address. By carefully organizing, training and monitoring volunteers, you can effectively expand your planned giving activities in a number of areas.

Purchase a membership with the Canadian Association of Gift Planners

The Canadian Association of Gift Planners (CAGP-ACPDP™) supports philanthropy by fostering the development and growth of gift planning. Our Association creates awareness, provides education and is an advocate of charitable giving.

The cost of membership is minimal compared to the benefits you will receive in return. From partner discounts, complimentary access to numerous planned giving websites and your organization listed on our public website www.leavealegacy.ca for potential donors to search, your membership fee will be worth its weight instantly.

In addition, our members all adhere to the CAGP-ACPDP™ Code of Ethics, which provides comfort to potential donors.

For more information on becoming a member, please visit www.cagp-acpdp.org.

NB: The information contained in this article was originally written by Leslie Howard and published on the website www.planforgifts.com, a sister site of the CAGP-ACPDP™ designed specifically for charities and non-profit organizations who are establishing a new planned giving program or enhancing an existing one.

Diane MacDonald is the Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Gift Planners and can be reached at diane@cagp-acpdp.org.

Please note: While we ensure that all links and email addresses are accurate at their publishing date, the quick-changing nature of the web means that some links to other web sites and e-mail addresses may no longer be accurate.