"Do Your Giving While You're Living!" - A Petrus Development Show Episode on Planned Gifts

Rhen is again joined by Tara Doyon, director of operations and senior consultant for Petrus, in this week's episode of the Petrus Development show.  Tara and Rhen broach the potentially intimidating topic of planned giving, and they work to make the idea of planned gifts more accessible for fundraising professionals.  

Show Notes:

The primary lesson that Tara and Rhen share in this discussion is that fundraisers don't have to be the planned giving experts.  On the subject of planned giving, it's best to know the basics.  Beyond that, fundraisers simply need know which community experts can offer assistance with the specifics.  The most important thing that fundraisers need to do regarding planned giving is to find ways to start the conversation with their donors.  

In this episode, Tara and Rhen answer the following questions:

• What is planned giving?  What are typical types of planned gifts?
• Who are top planned giving prospects?  Who should you be talking to about planned gifts?
• How do we encourage planned gifts?
• What is a gift acceptance policy and why is it necessary for your organization?

As Rhen mentions at the end of the episode, Petrus created a free planned giving cheat sheet to help you get the planned giving conversation started.  If you'd like to receive this resource, please click here for more information.    

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Here is the transcript with corrections for spelling and grammar:

00:15.48
aggierobison
Um, well, howdy everybody? Welcome back to the Petrus Development Show. My name is Rhen Hoehn from Petrus, and joining me today is Tara Doyon, the director of operations for Petrus and a long-time fundraiser and fundraising consultant. Welcome back, Tara.

00:30.38
Tara Doyon
Thanks for having me, Rhen.

00:33.90
aggierobison
Great. So today, we're just going to dive right into it. We wanted to talk about one of these scarier topics in fundraising for fundraisers, at least in my experience, and that's planned giving. We know that we're moving into a time in history when a lot of transfer of wealth is about to happen, and planned gifts are the types of gifts that people make from their estate, especially when they pass away and such. Do you have any experience with planned giving you can tell us about, Tara?

00:58.97
Tara Doyon
Absolutely, so planned giving is definitely an area you hit the nail on the head that a lot of fundraisers tend to shy away from because it often involves terms and negotiation tactics that we're just not familiar with, unless you're a financial planner or an attorney that specializes in that avenue of giving. It is an overwhelming and scary topic. However, when we break it down and look at the reality of working with people on their planned gifts, it's really simple. Hopefully, we can discuss a little bit more how we can make this topic not so scary and really applicable to all of our organizations. But I do want to talk about a planned giving story that really happened to me and the ministry that I was working with. I think this serves as an example of a couple of different things that develop within ministry relationships and your donor interactions. So I had a gentleman, and let's call him John, who was single, divorced, and had grandchildren. He was retired and was a part of our ministry, a part of our parish that I was working at at the time, and he gave $5. He wrote a check for $5 every single Sunday.

02:24.81
Tara Doyon
If we ever had an additional envelope collection or something, it was $5. That's what he gave, standard, standard, standard. A very generous, lovely person. He wasn't super involved in our parish but attended regular mass. People knew who he was. He always stopped to talk to the priest outside when he was leaving, but just kind of your average person in the pew. He gave me a call one day and said that he wanted to talk to me about a gift from his estate when he passed, so I actually made an appointment with him to go out to his house and have a conversation. I wasn't sure what to expect. I didn't know what he was thinking. I knew that he had grown children, but you just never know the dynamics there, so I went out to his house. It was a lovely brick ranch house kind of out in the country, and I pulled up. We had a great conversation, and he started to pull out all these file folders of paperwork and laid it out in front of me and said, "I am going to give my entire estate to the church when I pass." So I'm like, "Okay," and so what? But what does

03:34.52
aggierobison
Wow, right?

03:39.91
Tara Doyon
Really mean? And so he started to pull out all the paperwork, and that included he wanted to leave the deed to his property, which was this lovely brick ranch house, and we live in the Midwest, so, you know, a good price but not exorbitant in terms of value, and like fifty acres of land that the house sat on, his vehicles, including a classic Cadillac that had been restored, his life insurance policy (he wanted to designate us the beneficiary of his life insurance), and he worked for the telephone company for years, so when he retired, he was given all these stock options, and so he had at least $1,000,000 worth of stock that he had just been sitting on that he was also leaving to the church. And to make it even easier for us, he had already gone ahead and prepaid his funeral. So I, you know, I went there thinking this was just an average guy, average house, thinking maybe he's going to leave us a couple thousand dollars, which is amazing and very generous, and we're grateful for that. But I was totally surprised at the amounts of real estate, property, insurance money, stock options that he was leaving for us. He's still alive. He's still

05:09.89
Tara Doyon
Giving his $5 every week. But it was just really amazing to have him help me realize that gift. I got to know him better. I got to understand why he really wanted to give the gift to the church and some things that happened in his earlier life that really impacted him and why he felt like this was a really important gift. But it really taught me a couple of things. One, it taught me to never, never underestimate the amount of someone's wealth based on just their regular Sunday giving or what kind of car they drive or who they are. It taught me that I need to get to know every single person, every person is an opportunity to just get to know better and hear their story and just learn about their fantastic lives. But it also taught me to really promote this idea of what the generosity can come from people's estates. Most people, they think, "Oh, I don't need a will because I don't have that much money," or "I guess, you know, I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. Only people that had wills were like the people on TV that were assumed to be really rich. You know, 'I left this money in my will,'" and

06:18.25
aggierobison
Right.

06:22.13
Tara Doyon
So I think that was just kind of the mentality that we grew up with, and so if you are in my age demographic or probably even younger if you're working in development at small shops, especially you might think that, you know, people that have wills are only these super, super wealthy. But in actuality, every person should have an estate plan. A lot of people, even these middle-class Americans, have the opportunity to give from their estate. Lots of times, there is extraordinary wealth hidden in places that we don't even understand, and also, our donors don't necessarily understand too. So it is our job within that development driver's seat to offer opportunities and educate them and allow people to be generous at the end of their life.

07:09.72
aggierobison
That is an amazing story. Yeah, that it kind of feels like one big gift there, right? But there's really multiple different types of planned gifts within that. You got a property, you said a life insurance policy, you got stocks, all these different pieces. So maybe we should kind of go

07:17.14
Tara Doyon
Um, yeah.

07:23.44
Tara Doyon
Ah.

07:27.77
aggierobison
To the beginning here now. What exactly is planned giving, and what are some typical types of planned gifts that a nonprofit might encounter from their donors?

07:35.26
Tara Doyon
Yeah, so essentially, and I don't have the exact definition term, but in layman's terms, a planned gift is a gift designated to a charity at the end of someone's life from their estate. Most of the common planned gifts, I think the statistic that we talked about earlier is 85%, 85% of planned gifts are going to come in the vehicle of a bequest. A bequest essentially is just the cash offering from an estate once that estate has closed, once that person has passed, directly to the charity. So for example, when we talk about wills, John and Judy Smith, when they pass away, they are leaving St. Paul Mission $20,000 from their estate. So oftentimes, it will come as a specific dollar amount to the charity, but oftentimes it also will come, and I think probably it's fifty-fifty in bequests, it'll come as a percentage. So it'll say, you know, "I'm bequeathing 10% of my estate to said organization at the end of my life when the estate closes." And so oftentimes when there are variables, if they're if the person holds stock options, insurance policies, things that are not

09:04.79
Tara Doyon
Fixed dollar amounts, they would have worked most likely with their financial advisor to make sure the language is inclusive of a percentage because we know that percentage dollar amount changes with the market. And so someone may have created their will or estate plan 10 years prior. The market looks a little different when they pass ten years later, so they leave that percentage so it is variable with that market. Other people just sometimes have a more fixed view of what that looks like, and they want to leave a very specific dollar amount. So bequests typically come in, and I would say probably fifty-fifty if it's going to be a percentage or a fixed dollar amount. But it is an actual cash gift that will be gifted to your organization upon the person's death.

09:52.88
aggierobison
Right? And sometimes you hear that grouped into what you might hear called expectancies, right? So gifts that are kind of designated ahead of time, and we know that sometime around there they're going to come in, like a bequest in somebody's will. It could also be a beneficiary designation.

09:56.81
Tara Doyon
Yes.

10:04.27
Tara Doyon
Ah.

10:08.87
aggierobison
So, so like on an IRA or retirement account or a life insurance policy, things like that. But these are gifts that could be revoked, right? They could go and change their will or change the beneficiary designation prior to their death, but those are probably the most common types of gifts that you see.

10:09.10
Tara Doyon
Ah.

10:18.15
Tara Doyon
Ah.

10:25.27
Tara Doyon
Yeah, property too often comes in for a bequest. But again, it's like a very specific thing that's mentioned specifically for the organization.

10:27.20
aggierobison
Designating the nonprofit in that way.

10:38.10
aggierobison
Right, exactly. And then there's some other maybe less common but still out there types of planned gifts. Do you want to talk about kind of some of those at a very high level? You got things like charitable lead trusts.

10:47.65
Tara Doyon
Yes.

10:52.51
aggierobison
Charitable remainder trusts, it's really really confusing, there's two different ones there. There's a difference there, though. Charitable gift annuity, do you have any experience with any of those?

11:00.40
Tara Doyon
Yeah, so one of the things that I would say before we even get into the definitions and talking about this, because this is where it gets tricky, this is kind of like, "Okay, I understand someone gifting us a gift in their will, a bequest. That's very common, makes sense." But when we talk about like

11:17.30
aggierobison
Right, right.

11:19.78
Tara Doyon
Annuities and trusts, that's when we start to panic. And honestly, it's not something that I dealt with a lot when I was in active ministry. So we developed cheat sheets, and I think we actually have a blog post that has some really great cheat sheets that defines these terms and really allows you to be able to understand them. You're not going to deal with these all the time, and so unless you're again, a financial planner or someone who's dealing with this all the time or specifically working in planned giving, it's going to be a foreign term, so we have developed some cheat sheets for you so you can go to our blog and download that.

11:43.50
aggierobison
Right.

11:58.99
Tara Doyon
So you are not a deer in the headlights when it comes to hearing these terms, but back it up. Most of the people that have any of these mechanisms in place, trusts, if you have a trust, I promise you if someone comes to you to say, "I want to leave you a planned gift in the form of a trust," I promise you that person is working with a financial planner. Average Joe is not creating a trust for themselves on their computer and not working with a financial planner, a wealth manager, an attorney. Every single person that

12:20.59
aggierobison
Right.

12:35.70
Tara Doyon
Is working in these sort of avenues of giving has someone that they're working with, and that is a huge benefit to you and your organization because you don't have to become the expert. So just remember, if someone does come to you with these sort of opportunities for giving, don't pretend to be an expert because it's not your area necessarily. Know that they are going to be working with a financial planner. You can have conversations with that financial planner if you work in an organization, such as the Catholic Church, like a lot of our ministries that we work with are, or organizations that we're working with are, they're going to have archdiocesan and planned giving offices, and those people are the experts. And so you can always defer to them, just don't get scared because it is very overwhelming. But yeah, so charitable remainder trust, let's talk about that. We again have our cheat sheet, and it's basically

13:19.20
aggierobison
Yeah.

13:33.18
Tara Doyon
A trust that provides income to the donor or beneficiaries for a set period, with the remaining assets going to the nonprofit upon that person's death. So that is something that someone will oftentimes come to when you talk about planned giving or have an opportunity, and they might say that this is the sort of trust that they have in place. A charitable lead trust is a little bit different. The income is distributed to a nonprofit for a set period of time, with the remaining assets going back to the donor's beneficiary. So the remainder trust is going to go to the nonprofit. The lead trust is going to go back to the family, so similar but different beneficiaries at the person's end of life.

14:17.42
aggierobison
Got you, so they're this is usually a situation where they're looking for tax advantages to make a gift maybe right now, put the money into a trust right now for tax purposes, and then the trust pays out a fixed income to one party for

14:23.59
Tara Doyon
Ah.

14:33.00
aggierobison
Either a set term or for the donor's lifetime, and then at the end of that term or the end of their lifetime, whatever is left in that trust goes to another party. So I think the lead versus remainder speaks about the nonprofit. So if it's a lead trust, it's the fixed payments that go to the nonprofit.

14:42.61
Tara Doyon
Ah.

14:50.47
aggierobison
If it's a remainder trust, it's whatever's left over at the end that goes to the nonprofit, right?

Tara Doyon
Yep, exactly.

14:51.72
Tara Doyon
Yeah, so remainder, you think about the end, what's left over. The other one that I think you mentioned, and I think we have in our cheat sheet, and that we hear that's kind of like, "Okay, and not sure what that is," is the charitable gift annuity. And that's just basically a contract that donors contribute assets in exchange for a fixed income stream for life, with the remaining assets going to the nonprofit. So these are a little more tricky because that actually means that the nonprofit is going to receive a donation upfront based on this stream of income or the stream of wealth that the individual has, and then again, when the person passes, that remainder is going to go. That again is a little tricky, but remember, you're going to work with a financial planner. You're going to reach out to someone, preferably within your stream of organizational support, that can help you understand how these work. And I think we'll talk about this a little bit before we cap off, but it also gives back to understanding your gift acceptance policies and making sure that you have the capability to actually accept these sorts of gifts. Some organizations have designations within their gift acceptance policies. We'll touch on this in a minute that says that they can only accept certain gifts because they just don't have the ability to work with those vehicles of giving.

16:18.65
aggierobison
Right? So well, we won't go any deeper than that right now. I like, Tara mentioned, you can check out the cheat sheet if you go to petrusdevelopment.com/143 because this is episode one forty-three of the Petrus Development Show, petrusdevelopment.com/143. You can access our cheat sheet that lays out 6 of the most common types of planned gifts, what they are, what types of financial situations a donor might be in that they want to make that type of gift, it'll help you identify who the right donors are to make those types of gifts, and then what type of professionals you might want to engage to help you set up that type of a gift. So petrusdevelopment.com/143. Great. So let's talk just a little bit for a minute here about who are your top planned giving prospects, who are the people you should be talking to about these types of gifts? If you're a, pull up your database, looking at your donors, you mentioned this gentleman who's given $5 a week as a either ongoing donation, that may not stand out to you as, "Hey, this person's got a lot of wealth," but they give with a very regular frequency. So maybe that's an indicator of a good

17:24.25
Tara Doyon
Yeah, absolutely. So when we look at the giving cycle, we look at someone who is really connected to the organization. We look at two things: the dollars given and the frequency of giving. And in both of those scenarios, the dollars amount given and frequency of giving,

17:25.28
aggierobison
Plan giver,

17:42.90
Tara Doyon
Really put you in a position to examine your donor database to see who might be the good prospect for a planned gift. In this case, he did not have a high what we interpreted as a high wealth capacity. You know, $5 every week certainly was a gift that we felt was generous and appreciated based on what we actually even knew about this gentleman, so we didn't think anything of it. But the frequency that every single year, or every single collection for years and years and years, he gave $5 really should have set something off in my mind, and it didn't. So what I really encourage my clients to do when they're looking at their beneficiary pool is to look at frequency of giving. If someone is giving regularly, they're committed to your organization. They love your organization. They have deemed it a priority, even if the dollar amount is not high. The frequency that they are giving, in my opinion, is a great indicator of their possibility to make a planned gift. For example, this guy didn't have a huge amount of liquidity. He didn't have a lot of necessarily liquid cash here. I say that he actually probably did. He just, he didn't appear to be a person that had a lot of liquidity, but his assets were unbelievable. And so we see a lot of people like that. They have really great life insurance policies. They've had good retirement plans. They've had

19:15.14
Tara Doyon
Good stock options maybe from their corporate life or whatever sort of opportunities that they had in, you know, prior to retirement. Those types of people sometimes are very unidentifiable by the way the lifestyle that they're leaving or they're leading. We don't necessarily know what that looks like. And a lot of the generation that we're seeing with this transfer of wealth is the baby boomer generation. And again, I think we mentioned in the next twenty years, we are going to realize the largest transfer of wealth in the entire world, the history of the world, eighty-four point four trillion, trillion dollars. I had to make sure I was like, "Trillion, yeah, eighty-four point four trillion dollars," is going to become available

20:02.68
aggierobison
Man.

20:12.50
Tara Doyon
When our baby boomer generation passes in the next twenty years, and that is a huge, huge amount of wealth. And a lot of it is not liquid cash, a lot of it is life insurance policies, retirement plans. If you look at

20:26.98
aggierobison
Great wealth.

20:30.64
Tara Doyon
The baby boomer generation, these are, you know, my parents, my parents' age, they're in their seventies, you know, sixties, seventies, eighties, that sort of generation. Probably late sixties is probably the very beginner of the baby boomer generation. They were raised by parents that grew up in the Depression. They were raised by Depression-era parents when people died and didn't have life insurance because the banks had collapsed, and corporations had failed, and farming was troublesome. So all of these sorts of things, so I know like one of the things growing up, my grandmother was like adamant about with my mom, and it's just something that we always talked about, was life insurance. "Oh, we have to have a life insurance policy. We have to have a life insurance policy," because that was something that she experienced in her life growing up, that they sometimes didn't have money for funerals or any sort of safety net. So retirement plans and life insurance policies were very, very important to the generation that didn't necessarily have access to them. And so they passed that importance down to their children, those baby boomers. And those baby boomers are the people that are going to be passing in the next twenty years and passing that wealth. So we have to, we have to learn how to harness that wealth energy and direct it to our organizations. We know a lot of people are going to pass and give their money to their kids. That's, you know, they have

22:02.94
Tara Doyon
Kids, they have grandkids, and the cost of college education and housing and all these sorts of things. It's going to be very important for them to make sure that their children, their loved ones are taken care of. But a lot of that goes beyond just taking care of their loved ones. They have assets that are beyond just simple college education funds. And so we want to give them an opportunity to give that away tax-free. We know in every estate there's going to be that, you know, the tax man is going to come to every estate plan, and there is going to be a percentage that has to be paid out to various tax entities. Well, we have an opportunity to work with our donors to help them realize that they can give a portion of their estate away to our nonprofit organizations, and instead of paying the government or, you know, paying the tax man or whatever you want to call it, it's actually going to go back into their community to support the organizations that they love.

23:02.84
aggierobison
So what does that look like in practice? How do we encourage planned gifts from donors?

23:08.82
Tara Doyon
Yeah, so it's simply about having that conversation. We oftentimes tiptoe around planned giving because it comes with death, right? I mean, a planned gift is not going to come to fruition unless someone dies. And

23:18.69
aggierobison
Right.

23:24.20
Tara Doyon
Especially when we're talking about older people that are in our organizational realm, we want, you know, we want to be aware of that. We don't want to be like, "Hey, would you croak? Are you going to give us a chunk of cash?" I mean, that sounds like in our mind we're thinking that maybe in development, but we don't, you know, we have more tact. We love people. We don't want to see them pass. And so we avoid it because we don't want to become tacky. We don't want to talk about it, but there are a lot of ways that you can be tactful and talk about it and just educate your donors. A lot of organizations that I've worked with, when they talk to individuals about making a planned gift to the church, they don't even think about the church or a parish or organization if that's the sort of organization you're working with. They think about, you know, your Red Cross, you think about your alma mater, and they think about their kids and all these sorts of things. And when we talk about, "Hey, have you ever thought about making a planned gift to your church?" I always get the same

24:08.60
aggierobison
Right.

24:23.59
Tara Doyon
Response, "I hadn't thought about that, but that's a really good idea." So we have to give opportunities where we can just share that this should be a possibility. We could do that through a variety of things, educational opportunities within your church bulletin. I know a lot of churches, and I'm talking specifically now to churches because I think that is a lot of our audience right now, but it can be sort of applied to any organization, newsletters, parish bulletins. People that are still reading print material from our organization are the people that are going to be passing in the next twenty years and leaving all this wealth.

25:00.12
aggierobison
Right.

25:01.93
Tara Doyon
So capitalize on that media, that vehicle of media delivery, of common writing to share information. So our church bulletins, our newsletters, or organizational newsletters, share what you can do to make a planned gift, talk about how planned gifts have actually already affected your organization, share stories of people that are willing to come forward and say, "I've made a plan to gift. You should do it too." One of my mentors, the late Dr. Helen Gibbons, she was very generous in her lifetime and was very open and actually about her planned gift, and one of her favorite sayings was, "Do your giving while you're living so you know where it's going."

25:53.31
Tara Doyon
And I think that's really important that we should share with people, you know, "Make your plans now so you know exactly where it goes." So when we have an opportunity to talk about that, you know, and people are getting out in front of their peers to say, "Hey, I did this because it's important for me to direct the money. You should consider it too." It makes people really think, "Oh okay, that's a good idea." One of the great things that I have seen come to fruition in the last couple of years with a lot of the organizations that I've worked with are some legacy series, legacy giving series, planned giving, end-of-life series. They have a lot of different names, but they all serve the same purpose. I really suggest with the organizations I'm working with that they break it up into kind of a three-part process. The first process, especially if you're coming from a religious organization or a church, is all about planning your end of life.

26:50.86
Tara Doyon
Desires and what that means, or a will, what it looks like. If you're working with the church, it's "When do I actually call a priest? Do I call a priest like when I'm really, really on my deathbed, or am I just thinking about, you know, entering hospice or whatever that looks like? But when do we actually call a priest, and what happens when we call the priest?" A lot of the people that we work with in the older generation, they'll refer to calling the priest at the end of someone's life as "last rites," but it's really the anointing of the sick, and people actually receive the anointing of the sick when they're not on their deathbed, but when they are sick or in need of some healing. But I think sometimes we get confused with that. So we want to make sure people understand what it means to call the priest. And I don't know if you've ever heard this, I've heard people, older people in my family say, "Oh, they called the priest, you know, it's going soon. They've called the priest," did you mean?

27:42.80
aggierobison
Yep.

27:47.81
Tara Doyon
So having those real conversations of when it's okay to call the, I mean, it's always okay to call the priest, but what we really should be calling the priest for, planning your funeral. I mean, what does that really look like? So many people, and I worked at a parish for close to 15 years, and I saw firsthand so many families when they have a loved one that passes, they're meeting with, you know, the person that works with the liturgy, working with the priest, and they're trying to figure out, you know, "What songs am I going to have at the funeral? Who's going to be a reader? What does this look like?" Those sorts of things are hard to even think about when you're in a state of grief or shock. And so plan it out ahead of time. My dad's been gone for about 12 years now, and before he did pass, we actually sat down and had this really hard conversation about planning his funeral. And I remember going to his house that day that we were going to write his obituary. He had cancer. He knew it was going to pass. We're going to write his obituary and plan his funeral, and I just remember thinking this is the most morbid, terrible thing that I will ever have to do, and I kind of thought about it, I didn't like it. However, when he actually passed, I am so thankful that we did that.

28:48.78
aggierobison
Me too.

29:01.60
Tara Doyon
Because I didn't have to think about anything then. I showed up at the church. I had kind of my worksheet that they gave me, "Here are my songs, here are my readers, and here are all the moving parts that require brain power that you don't usually have to offer when you're in a state of grief."

29:02.30
aggierobison
Right.

29:19.15
aggierobison
Right.

29:21.30
Tara Doyon
And it was also really lovely. Actually, when we got to the funeral and I said the opening words and welcomed people, and I just said, "I want everyone here today to sit in this mass and realize that my dad had a say in this. I want you to find solace that he approved of this, and this is exactly what he wanted, and his wishes are going to be carried out. And I want that to be able to comfort you." And I do think that that was really touching for people that loved my father and were in a grieving state, that they were able to have kind of one last opportunity to hear his voice in what was happening. So again, our legacy series talks about that, how we can kind of pre-plan this information that we are able to then share with our loved ones to make it easier for them. The second part of that legacy series is the actual giving portion. What does that look like? What does giving to your church look like? How can your church accept these gifts? What sort of things will your church or your organization do after you have passed? And so we work with a financial planner or an attorney that's within our organization bubble and bring them in and have them talk to our people about what that looks like to make an estate plan if you haven't done so, how do you let the people, the beneficiaries of your gift, know that this is actually happening, so all those sorts of things. And then the third part of that legacy series, I

30:44.64
aggierobison
Right.

30:51.57
Tara Doyon
Like to talk about care options. What are some care options in your community? Nursing, what is, you know, nursing, in-home health care, what does anything that looks like hospice care or anything in those realms of care for your loved ones and support for your loved ones? What does that look like? And I think when you can kind of package it this way, it takes the focus off of, "We just really want your money when you're gone," but really talks about, you know, how we holistically can approach the end of life through a liturgical lens or a sacramental lens to make sure the person's actual desires and wishes are carried out. 

31:29.78
aggierobison
I love that. This brings me back to, well, there's a couple points that I wanted to touch back on. So you mentioned earlier on that we tend to assume that our donors are thinking about our organization as they're making these plans, right? And at last year's Raise 2023 conference, one of the speakers, Cory Howitt from the Catholic Foundation of New Orleans, talked about planned giving, and he talked about a story of a lady who was a very devoted member of her parish. She went to mass every day, was involved in all the different organizations, the altar society, etc. And as she was passing away and her final days, the priest was with her there every day for the last few weeks, a lot, you know, all this involvement. And just before she passed away, the local humane society came and asked her for a planned gift, and when she did pass away, all of her estate went to the humane society, and the priest was kind of shocked, like she'd been involved every day of her life at her local parish, and all of her assets went to the dogs and cats. And the kind of hard fact there is the humane society came and asked for the gift.

32:45.94
Tara Doyon
Hmm, yeah.

32:46.44
aggierobison
They didn't ask for it, so she didn't even consider it, right? Assume that the church has money, it's taken care of. They may not need my money. And so we really just have to go in there and make the ask and ask them to consider it, and they get to make a decision, but just going in there making that ask is key for carrying those out. And I know it's something that we can be kind of scared to ask our donors, but like you mentioned, it's kind of a morbid feeling thing. It really does give them the opportunity to tell us what they want to do with their gifts because when they're gone, they can't give you any further instruction. So an organization

33:11.75
Tara Doyon
Ah.

33:17.48
Tara Doyon
Yeah, absolutely.

33:21.17
aggierobison
That I worked at, we got a very substantial six-figure gift that, the donor's instructions, this is a planned bequest, so after he passed away, this gift showed up, hundreds of thousands of dollars to be used for scholarships. And he had put in there very specifically that he wanted it used for scholarships for students of Slovenian descent, which is not a lot of people. So it would have been great to be able to talk to him right and say, "Okay, that's awesome. We'll definitely honor that. But if we don't have any students of Slovenian descent, what next? What do we do next?" right, to get that further instruction from him. It would have been great to have that conversation before he passed away rather than trying to piece it together, figure it out. He had no known descendants that we could find to even ask, you know, his family. So, yeah, it's really important to have those conversations even though it is a little bit scary, a little bit morbid, to go in there and make those asks and talk through those topics.

34:14.83
Tara Doyon
Yeah, absolutely. The worst thing you can do is realize a gift and not know what to do with it or have the capability to actually use it to serve your organization.

34:27.93
aggierobison
Exactly. So maybe that brings us kind of to a final point here. You mentioned earlier about gift acceptance policies. Why is that important to have, especially around planned gifts?

34:31.85
Tara Doyon
Yeah, so it's really important that you have specific outlines within your organization of what sort of gifts that you can accept. And when we've spent a lot of time talking about gifts of cash, gifts of retirement funds, distributions from those, trusts, all those sorts of things, but we really get into sticky situations sometimes when we come to realize some restricted gifts. So for example, like this cash but it has a lot of restrictions attached to it, as well as gifts of property and things. So I think personally, we tend to have more problems, and I don't know the statistics that I'm probably just speaking from practical experience. We've had more problems with gifts that people want to leave to your organizations of tangible items. How many times when people pass that they call the church and say, "I'm leaving the church my piano," and there are 50 out-of-tune pianos that cost $1,000 to move, and we don't need them? Or an organization, I worked with an organization that someone passed and actually left them a parcel of real estate, and they accepted it, you know, great. "This is great. We're going to accept this, and we're going to sell it." When they actually went to get the appraisal done to sell it,

36:09.80
Tara Doyon
They realized that that particular area had been previously a gas station and didn't have the proper abatement when they removed the gas tanks and the holding tanks and all these sorts of things. And so before they could sell it, they actually had to do some environmental cleanup with it, and they actually lost money because they spent all this time and energy and money having to do the cleanup before they could sell it. So if they had had a gift acceptance policy in place that said before we accept a gift of real estate or a particular item that you have the option to refuse that item first of all if it doesn't fit with the organizational mission, but also receive the specific assessments. So you know, a real estate assessment that the donor pays for, or if it's artwork, that they have some sort of documentation on the value or anything like that, that we make sure we have those sorts of things in place so we're not accepting real estate that costs us more to sell or we're not accepting or offending people when we say, "We thank you so much for thinking of us for your piano, but our organization actually can't accept that right now per our gift acceptance policy." And you, you know, you have a policy to blame, and that just sets the standard across the board, and it really makes it pretty clear. So if you don't have a gift acceptance policy, call other organizations within your community, call if you have, you know, parent organizations within your reach. So if you're a parish or a Catholic school, you have an archdiocesan policy, I'm sure. If you don't have one, find one, work with other organizations that you know have a long track record of giving. See what they have, don't reinvent the wheel, but adopt one. It's going to be really important so to make sure your organization can actually accept the gifts and use them to the benefit of the mission that they are executing.

38:16.55
aggierobison
Yeah, very important. Great. One final thing I don't think we actually mentioned, I wanted to fit in, there is that on average, you're only ever going to know about about 25% of the planned gifts that are made to your organization, but specifically talking about bequests here, I think before the donor passes away. So most planned gifts that you get are going to be a surprise. And that was true in my experience working in ministry. And so all you can do is put the word out there, mention planned gifts all the time, ask people, and you probably won't know the results of all that effort,

38:49.20
Tara Doyon
Ah.

38:52.75
aggierobison
Maybe not even the whole time that you work there, right? Though, they'll be coming in for decades. In my experience, most of the people that did tell us that they were making planned gifts were in their forties, so I mean that's decades and decades away from realizing those gifts. But you just know that there are more out there that will be a surprise that you get in.

38:53.17
Tara Doyon
Yeah.

39:09.77
aggierobison
Or is a letter in the mail one day from a lawyer, so just get out there and make the ask.

39:12.58
Tara Doyon
Yeah, and open your mail, open your mail. But...

39:16.90
aggierobison
100%. Great. So if you want to get that cheat sheet on the most common types of gifts that Tara mentioned earlier, go to petrusdevelopment.com/143, again this is episode one forty-three, make it nice and easy, petrusdevelopment.com/143. And there are still a few weeks left if you want to join us in San Antonio this June for RAISE24, the Catholic fundraising conference. It's June 24th through 26th, 2024, like I said, in San Antonio at Hotel Contessa. And we're going to have lots of great speakers talking about all different types of fundraising topics. It's open to anybody. We have kind of a very, very specific focus on Catholic ministries, but it's open to any nonprofit who wants to join us, learn about fundraising and connect with lots of other fundraisers from all over. We have people coming from the US, from Canada, from the Philippines, and maybe one or two other countries in there too. So it's going to be lots of different fundraisers from all different types and ministries.

40:06.41
Tara Doyon
Hmm.

40:12.10
aggierobison
Looking forward to that.

40:12.19
Tara Doyon
Yeah, we have a really diverse group this year. It's really exciting. And a lot of new people that are coming this year, a lot of people that come to our conferences are the people that we know that come every year, and we obviously love to see them. But I was looking at the roster of attendees, and there are a lot of new people. So if you're thinking about coming but feel like you don't know anybody or maybe you're new to development and this is a little intimidating, I just want you to know you're going to be in perfect company with veteran fundraisers but also people that are coming for the first time too, a lot of first-year attendees. So you don't need to feel overwhelmed. I think we're a really welcoming group. We're a really fun group. So if you're thinking about it, reach out to us. We can help you understand how to make this work with your budget.

40:55.54
aggierobison
Exactly, and but yeah, like you said, there's a big contingent of people who are in their first year or two of fundraising who are coming, and there's a bunch of people who are ten or more years of experience in fundraising coming. So it's a broad mix. So it's going to be fun to get together with all those people. So go to petrusdevelopment.com/raise24

41:04.75
Tara Doyon
Yeah, yeah.

41:14.97
aggierobison
To learn more information about that, and registration is open until June 7th, 2024, so act fast. You only have a few weeks left to come join us there. Excellent! I'm looking forward to seeing you in San Antonio, Tara.

41:21.82
Tara Doyon
I know. Yeah, I know, it'll be great. It's a time when we as a staff love to come together because we all get to see each other in person as well. So it'll be fun.

41:35.52
aggierobison
Exactly, exactly, and I'm not much of a city person. I like to be out in the woods far away from people, but I would say San Antonio is probably my favorite city I've ever visited. We did the conference there six or seven years ago, and it was just awesome. We're going to be right on the River Walk, which is a great ambiance, great atmosphere.

41:47.64
Tara Doyon
Yep.

41:52.44
aggierobison
Lots of fun, great restaurants. You can't beat the Tex-Mex. So I'm looking forward to that. Great. Well, thank you for joining us today, Tara. I'm sure we'll talk again soon. All right, have a great day.

41:53.37
Tara Doyon
Yeah, looking forward to it.

41:59.88
Tara Doyon
Thanks, Rhen, you too.