Building Success

Project duration: varies 

We work with your staff to take a 360-degree look at gift planning within the context of your total fundraising plan. Our process includes:

• Review policies and procedures, including gift acceptance and gift counting and crediting.
• Interview everyone involved in a successful gift planning effort: fundraisers, managers, executive leadership, gift administrators and, ideally, donors.
• Review historical data on fundraising results and analysis of key analytics like cost to raise a dollar and return on investment.
• Deep dive on existing donor data to develop a prioritized gift planning prospect list
• Identify peer organizations and assemble benchmarks for key program indicators.
• Compare your operations to the 16 best practices identified in the National Standards for Gift Planning Success.

Our perspective as experienced outsiders allows us to investigate the problems you’ve already identified and see opportunities for improvement that may not be apparent to you. We provide a detailed written report analyzing all 16 of the success factors identified in the National Standards along with immediate and longer-term recommendations for actions to improve your outcomes. We can also work with your fundraising staff to enhance collaboration and build skills needed to develop complex current gifts and larger planned gifts.

Case Study

Our client was a 120-year-old national health advocacy organization with a great reputation. Regional affiliates around the country were raising a lot of money through events but were understaffed for planned gift fundraising. A reorganization in 2019 had consolidated major and planned gift officers into the national staff, and competition developed between the national and local fundraisers. Even when the COVID-19 pandemic put an end to events, local fundraisers were reluctant to give the national team access to "their" loyal donors. 

When the organization's strategic business plan called for increasing revenue from individual donors, we were hired to assess potential for planned gifts. We evaluated program infrastructure, staff capacity and fundraising efforts. Our recommendations included strategic budgetary realignment, revised metrics, and updated gift counting and crediting policies. We emphasized rewarding collaboration among all gift officers and increased capacity to contact many planned gift prospects identified by the productive marketing program.

The organization's CEO appreciated our clear, actionable advice, and recently reported, "We have already adopted several of the recommendations and are planning for more down the road."    

Project duration: about 4 weeks

Successful gift annuity programs are a balance of increasing the number of gift annuities issued with managing the risk of administering the gift annuity reserve pool. We analyze the details of both of these factors and make recommendations to keep an existing program healthy, rebuild a languishing program, or create a new program, including:

• Projecting gift annuity program profitability
• Analyzing potential risk factors with recommendations for managing them
• Determining regulatory compliance in those states that regulate gift annuities
• Assess adequacy of reserves
• Analyzing investment strategy and performance 
• Recommending actions to strengthen the program and minimize risks 

Case Study

Our client was a 100-year old religiously-affiliated relief organization that had a great constituency for gift annuities, but had never offered them.  

We developed a comprehensive gift planning marketing plan with a particular focus on CGAs. This plan included printed materials, electronic materials, and a semi-annual webinar for the organization’s donors.

In a little over two years, our client received $49.4 million in revocable and irrevocable planned gifts, both current and deferred. Results from the charitable gift annuity focus were very impressive. They completed 21 CGA contracts totaling $1,030,000. The cumulative lifetime giving of these donors before their gift annuities was only $528,537 (gift annuity giving was larger by a factor of 1.9x). Thirteen of the gift annuitants had lifetime giving histories of $1,500 or less. The average age of CGA donors was 79 and the average gift was $50,000.