A well-crafted policies and procedures manual is essential for any non-profit. It helps guide how money will be received, how gifts will be entered into your CRM, and what gifts will be accepted and what gifts will not be accepted, among other things.
Including a section about planned giving is essential because it helps determine your course of action when you are having planned giving discussions. Will you accept a gift from a donor naming you as a beneficiary of their life insurance policy? (I suggest that you should!) What if the donor wants to leave you a piece of land with oil rights in Manitoba, Canada? That is a bit more complicated. Where is your organization located? Do you have someone on the board who is familiar with real estate law and/or mineral rights?
In my life as a fundraiser, I learned this the hard way. During a planned giving discussion a donor mentioned that they wanted to leave their timeshare to our organization. My recommendation was that we NOT accept this type of planned gift because of the maintenance fees we would be responsible for. The CEO said that we should accept this as a gesture of goodwill and use it as an auction item at our events. Because there was nothing in our policies and procedures manual prohibiting our acceptance of timeshares, it made it harder to decline this gift.
If the policies and procedures stated that we did not accept gifts of timeshares or that the board has the final say on which gifts are accepted, it would have been easier to decline this gift, which cost us a few years of maintenance fees.
It never sold at our auctions, and eventually, it became a raffle prize that no one ever used when they won it. My organization ended up giving it back to the group that sold the timeshares.
Your policies and procedures manual is the best way to ensure you accept gifts that are moving your mission forward, not backward, as in the timeshare case! The guardrails that the policies around planned giving provide make it easier to say that, as an organization, our policies prohibit us from accepting this gift. Or yes, we will accept this gift!
Your policies and procedures manual is a living document. It needs to be updated when life changes. What will you do when someone leaves cryptocurrency to your organization as part of their estate? This is happening now. Think through what you will do.
…And put it in writing!
michael@lifelegacy.io
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If you need a single, compelling reason to prioritize planned giving this year, here it is: around 46 billion dollars flows to charities every year through bequests. In fact, the latest Giving USA numbers show that bequests in 2024 totaled about $45.84 billion—roughly 8% of all U.S. charitable giving for the year. That’s not a rounding error; it’s a transformative funding stream your mission can’t afford to ignore.
One of the most interesting parts of planned giving is that you never know what is going to happen! Planned gifts will surprise you. In an earlier blog, I talked about the planned gift that I DIDN’T accept. That was not even close to the most interesting gift that I ever received.
And this one isn’t either. But it was something I never expected.
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