Igniting a Charitable Planned Giving Program

Charities often face problems raising money for long term stability, but at the same time they often become so consumed with fundraising for current needs or short-term expansions that they never really get around to establishing a planned giving program that can bring in large sums of money all at once. The biggest of these revenue strategies is often working with their donors, volunteers, and other stake holders on incorporating the charity into estate planning documents.

What exactly is planned giving? It's a systematic approach to reviewing an individuals finances, wealth, and tax position to find ways to benefit the charity while also coming out ahead financially. This also can significantly impact the beneficiaries of an estate if done properly. The simplest is providing for a charity in your Will or Trust. There are also methods of naming a charity as the beneficiary of a life insurance policy or an IRA. There are even Testamentary Charitable Remainder Trusts that can substantially reduce income taxes on a beneficiary, provide them a lifetime of income, and then also provide a substantial sum to the charity. However, I'm not going to get too deeply into these more complicated techniques and focus just on the simple technique of naming a charity in an estate plan since I have a video of me teaching at a recent estate planning conference that covers these techniques here (Stretching an Inheritance Over a Lifetime: Part 1 https://youtu.be/U4_ljmQ3eFU?si=cE79jZqXDcTnscfM Part 2 https://youtu.be/lVLPw9Htt6U?si=iZoGhf4w-J3pNWxT).

Simply naming a charity to receive a percentage of your estate or a specific dollar amount is easy enough to do, provided people actually put together their estate plan. Unfortunately, 72% of U.S. adults never get around to doing their own estate plan. As you may know, I recently launched a service where people can go online to create their own do-it-yourself estate planning documents without an attorney called The Estate Patch. A charity can receive a percentage of the sale of this system to their donor/volunteer/stakeholder while simultaneously encouraging them to provide for the charity in the event of their passing. 

Let's compare this to the typical large fundraiser by a charity, and the different "expenditures" they need to make:

Organization: Successful fundraisers often take up lots of organizational time by the leaders of charity in order to make sure "everything goes off without a hitch." This means that valuable time is diverted from other endeavors like providing the charity's core support to the community, recruiting new volunteers, and raising money through other ways. In comparison, simply attaching the offer for estate planning and planned giving on a regular basis through an affiliate link to The Estate Patch system will provide revenue to the charity with minimal effort.

Volunteers: Having a large fundraiser often takes a lot of volunteer time away from other projects and programs. For example in my own Civitan club, we hold an annual cornhole tournament to raise thousands of dollars for NC Special Olympics. Planning effort aside, the event requires a lot of volunteers for set up, take down, running the tournament, running the silent auction, and a ton of hitting up local businesses for silent auction donations. When it comes to encouraging planned giving through estate planning, it simply takes making sure that volunteer interactions with donors regularly incorporates a simple pitch for the program.

Resources: While this mostly means money, it also means equipment, tables and chairs, food, or other items that need to be donated or paid for. When it comes to items like the cornhole tournament I mentioned, a huge expense would have been rental of the nearly two dozen cornhole boards, which where thankfully donated by the awesome people at Triangle Lawn Games. With a planned giving pitch through estate planning documents, there is often little needed aside from time. Unless the charity plans to print handouts or use paid studio time to create promotions for encouraging a planned giving program like through The Estate Patch,  the cost should be negligible or actually zero.

If working with non-profits and charities is your thing, then please stay tuned for more information on how charities can work with The Estate Patch to provide short-term revenue while helping people incorporate the charity in their plans. We will also specifically provide a webinar on how to set up a simple planned giving program so smaller and younger charities can quickly and easily make planned giving a part of their long term fundraising goals.