Tracking gift of stock/IRA Qualified Charitable Dist./Bequest-Will/Beneficiary Life Insurance IRA gifts

Alicia Van Straten

We have been working more on promoting other “giving vehicles” as options to donors. Great news is that it is working! However, now we want/need to track these gifts so we can report out. I'm thinking something as simple as gift subtype but wanted to just throw this out here to see if I'm missing something with this idea or if others have a better way of tracking these? Thanks!

JoAnn Strommen

There is a gift type of Stock/Property to use. It also has the option to enter company, shares, broker fees and record as "Sold." I would use this as designed for these gifts.

Others generally are cash gifts. You could use a gift attribute, gift-subtype if not used for other things. (A gift can only have one sub-type so keep that in mind. Would more than one apply? You can have multiple gift attributes.)

We use different letters and reference field for some notes. I've never been asked for a report on IRA distributions - we have a lot.

Dana Burton

We use the stock option that JoAnn mentioned for stocks received.

For IRA's, we use the Fund Description code IRAD for IRA distributions and IRADD for IRA's that people want used for specific designations, such as paper, ink, or a language. We also use a letter code specifically for IRA's.

I have had to run reports on the IRADD's when the treasurer is working on the 990. Using these fund codes (and specific dates) makes reporting very easy!

Dariel Dixon

You're on point @Alicia Van Straten. Thinking about how you would report on this is the key to determining how you would do these. A Gift subtype is the easiest. Outside of the Stock gifts, like @JoAnn Strommen stated, the rest are cash with the exception of deferred gifts.

@Dana Burton's suggestion is very dependent on the fund/appeal/campaign structure. It may not work for everyone. But her point is valid, that whatever method you use it needs to be easily reported on and easy to exclude if necessary. A gift attribute might also be helpful for this reason.

Also, remember to receipt stock gifts correctly and not declare a value.

Faith Murray

We post stock gifts as stock/property, and then we have gift subtypes for IRA gifts, DAF gifts, Foundation grants, etc. This allows us to easily track and report.

We also keep a constituent attribute for Major Giving channels, with a drop-down table for more details including DAF gift, Community Foundation fund, Private Family Foundation, etc. In Comments, we track the name of the foundation. This allows us to easily merge into solicitation letters: “Would you consider giving $2,000 once again from the John Doe Family Fund?”

We do post and acknowledge a value for stock gifts … but if doing this, the important factor to remember is that the stock's value is determined by the cash value at date of sale (if liquidating before transfer); or, if retaining stock, value is determined by the average value on the date of actual transfer (not by the value it held when the transaction was initiated, as these will differ). Our acknowledgements are also clearly tagged: “Thank you for your gift of 20 Ameren shares, valued at $92 each.” So an org's policies in posting stock gifts will depend on its gift policy on the status of acceptance for said gifts.

Alicia Van Straten

Thanks guys! We currently use the Stock gift type as noted. My director has asked me to “track” these gifts so that she can report out to the board/whomever that x amount has been raised with X type of gifts. So I thought the gift subtype would be easy, but thank you JoAnn for reminding me that we are limited to one sub-type per gift. Currently we use it for any gifts to a scholarship endowment noting either PR or TR for our finance side. So we could get any of these gifts in for an endowment. So thinking it will have to be an attribute. We use our fund name/ID/GL code for designations which is largely what we live on. 100's of named scholarship funds so that wouldn't work. Now just need to check on how easy it would be to report on gift attribute but if I remember correctly, I think it is a pretty “easy” field to pull in a query.

Alicia Van Straten

So we decided to use gift attribute and then gift source. Easy to query on and still allows us to use gift subtype for our endowments. Thanks all!!