About Legacy Giving

Based on discussions with several hundred nonprofit leaders and numerous professional colleagues over the last two decades, I developed the Legacy Giving Building Blocks™ program to provide charities with easy to understand tools and a user-friendly methodology for encouraging and attracting gifts through wills and trusts. I did this for two reasons:

• First, most small and mid-size nonprofits lack the resources to staff and build a traditional legacy giving program.
• Second, the planned giving profession has been historically oriented to serving the needs of legacy giving programs at larger organizations.

Most organizations are looking for simple ways to talk with their supporters about legacy giving, and eager for basic tools to support their efforts. Legacy Giving Building Blocks™ represents the culmination of my work with a wide variety of individuals from a diverse cross-section of charities - all seeking to develop their competence and confidence in attracting long-term legacy support.

Q & A

How do you define legacy giving?

Why aren't more Americans creating legacy gifts?

What prompted the creation of the Legacy Giving Building Blocks™ program?

Why is legacy giving important to donors?

Why should charitable organizations encourage legacy giving?

I don't have a budget for Legacy Giving Building Blocks, any suggestions?

How do you define legacy giving?

Legacy Giving (Lĕg’ ə -sē Gĭv’ĭng)
-verb

1. To convey one's values through creation of a future gift to charity
2. A foresighted action to strengthen a favorite cause

Legacy gifts provide future support for charity. Contributions by will, trust, other forms of written designation, life-income arrangements and endowment gifts, all represent forms of legacy giving. Any individual, at any point in their life, can create a legacy gift. It can be as easy as naming a charity on the beneficiary form on a savings, checking or pension account, or through a more complex instrument like a charitable trust. All these gifts represent a powerful and meaningful way for individuals to create a philanthropic legacy for their community and the organizations they care about.

Why aren't more Americans creating legacy gifts?

Seven out of ten Americans make gifts to charity during their lifetime. Yet fewer than one in ten leaves a gift to charity in their will or trust. Why are most of us generous in supporting nonprofits during life but make no provision for them at death? Research studies provide a simple answer — it never occurred to most of us to create a legacy gift!

Even though we are in the midst of the largest inter-generational transfer of wealth in US history, charities have generally been unsuccessful in encouraging Americans to create legacy gifts. Arguably it is because we fail to communicate why legacy giving matters. Nonprofits don't explain that legacy gifts are an important form of philanthropy, a meaningful reflection and expression of one's values, and a powerful way to strengthen an organization's long-term mission. Instead, most charities promote the features of complex planned gift vehicles and overwhelm donors with technical information.

What prompted the creation of the Legacy Giving Building Blocks™ program?

When I entered the field of philanthropy in the late 1980's, the National Committee on Planned Giving (now the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning) had just been formed in response to the burgeoning interest in planned giving. It was created to "facilitate, coordinate, and encourage the education and training of the planned giving community, and to facilitate effective communication among the many different professionals in this community." NCPG responded to the needs of full-time planned giving staff at major educational and nonprofit institutions with formal planned giving programs by creating sophisticated conference programming, educational offerings and policy guidance with a decidedly technical and gift vehicle orientation.

As a newly minted lawyer beginning work as the Director of Planned Giving for the University of California, San Francisco, I was thrilled to join the 200 individuals who gathered for the NCPG's second national conference in 1989. I immersed myself in learning all the bells and whistles of complicated gift arrangements, tax policy, asset management and accounting rules. Like many newcomers to a profession, I was awed and self-absorbed by the technical knowledge I acquired.

It took several years before I realized the "deer in the headlights look" I received from legacy prospects resulted from my compulsion to overwhelm them with planned giving "techno-babble." My epiphany highlighted the importance of making the subject matter more user-friendly and accessible including using legacy giving in place of planned giving — a term understood only by the fundraising profession.

Why is legacy giving important to your supporters?

The reasons for creating a legacy gift are as diverse as the individuals who create them. Common reasons cited by legacy donors include:

• Represent a timeless way to support and sustain organizations they care about
• Provides an opportunity to memorialize themselves or a loved one
• Serves as an example to successive generations that this form of philanthropy can and should be done
• Creates a means to express appreciation to a charity that served them or their family
• Meets a need of the community
• Creates something of beauty
• Reflects a donor's religious, ethical or cultural values
• Planning and financial benefits

Most people want to "do good," and find legacy giving to be a meaningful and important way to "give back." Many realize that life events experienced in relation to a charity have been important to them, and valuable to the world around them.

Why should a nonprofit encourage legacy giving?

Creating diversified revenue streams is central to achieving consistent, mission-based outcomes. Legacy and endowment gifts provide a lifeline to the future by enabling organizations to achieve long-term financial stability and sustainability. They offer a powerful means to enhance and diversify a charity's fundraising efforts because:

• Almost everyone is a legacy prospect
• The largest gift most people make is a legacy gift
• Legacy gifts have the lowest cost of fundraising
• Legacy donors make larger annual gifts than non-legacy donors
• Only a small percentage of donors have been asked to make a legacy gift
• There are a wide variety of legacy gifts, many of which are very easy to create
• Legacy gifts are the only source of philanthropy that increase during tough economic times
• There will be a staggering transfer of wealth over the next 50 years