Is Your Nonprofit Ready for a Planned Gift?

Most nonprofits aren’t. A donor calls to say they’ve named your organization in their will, or want to give appreciated stock instead of cash, and suddenly your team is scrambling: Do we have a gift acceptance policy? Who signs off on this? What do we even say back to them?

Planned giving is any gift a donor arranges now to be given later, through a will, a beneficiary designation, a trust, or a transfer of assets like stock or retirement funds rather than cash. These gifts aren’t reserved for wealthy donors. They come from longtime supporters of modest means who’ve decided your organization matters enough to include in their final wishes.

Here’s why this deserves your attention now: planned gifts are typically the largest gift a donor will ever make to your organization, often as much as 150 times their biggest annual gift. A donor who’s given $500 a year for a decade might leave $75,000 in their estate. If your nonprofit isn’t prepared when that call comes, you risk losing the gift, mishandling it, or missing the chance to steward that donor properly while they’re still alive to see the impact.

Join Brandy Bertram, Principal of Great Big Good, for a practical workshop on planned giving fundamentals. You’ll leave with the knowledge and infrastructure to have these conversations confidently, and to say yes when the opportunity shows up.

What you’ll learn:

• Gift acceptance policies (so your board knows what to accept and what to decline)
• Monthly giving programs
• Bequests and beneficiary designations
• Gifts of non-cash assets
• IRA and qualified retirement plan gifts
• Planned giving prospecting
• Planned giving stewardship