Planned Gift Data Entry

Jill Rode

I have been tasked with creating a best practice for entering in planned gifts and cleaning up the past 10 years of gift entry. Does anyone have a best practice for entering into RE or RENXT and then pulling a report that summarizes? Thank you.

Austen Brown

@Jill Rode - Do you have the Planned Gift module?

Faith Murray

@Jill Rode, seconding Austen's question: whether you have the Planned Gift module will determine your practices. I highly recommend the module if you're going to invest in any type of intentional planned giving program.

If you do have the PG module, Gift types are fairly self-explanatory: annuities, bequests, insurance, trusts, etc. You have locations to enter Cash value, payment schedules, and link associated payments. BB provides user guides for all that, so I'll just go into our custom processes here.

• When an annuitant isn't on a monthly schedule, we found it helpful to add an Attribute/Custom field with the exact month that annuity payments are to be due. This allows us to pull lists of donors each month whose payments are mailing, and follow up.
• We created a Business Rule (attached to a query) to alert data entry staff if a person has a Planned Gift while gift batching. Otherwise, these don't show up the way pledges and recurring gifts do, so a staffer may otherwise not remember to link the cash gift to its Planned Gift intention.
• During initial cleanup, we pulled a gift query of all previously entered planned gifts (which had been entered as Cash Gifts in the 90's, even though no cash had been received!) and replaced them with Planned Gift records. You just have to be careful if those gifts have been posted to Financial Edge in a former fiscal year. If so, be sure to adjust to $0 instead of deleting.
• Instead of keeping a separate spreadsheet with donors who “have left us in their will” but not specified an amount, we decided to go ahead and enter a planned gift anyway, using an assumptive average gift level. It's easy enough to change it later.
• Make sure your regular financial reports are set to exclude Planned Gifts if your org policy doesn't count them as revenue until receipt.
• The PG module comes with its own array of PG reports in database view, under “Financial Reports”. Here you can filter on Gift Vehicles, Maturity Date, Revocability, etc.

If you don't have the PG module (get it, get it) then you can accommodate instead by either:

• Using Proposals to track Planned Gift intentions. You can create similar Business Rules to tag Proposals, and you can also link gifts to Proposals. While you're missing most of the coveted PG features you can create Proposal Attributes to track most of the relevant info like Vehicle, Schedule, etc. You can also run Proposal reports under Prospect Research Reports in database view.
• You could use pledges, marked Do Not Post and create a new Gift Subtype; but I don't recommend it, as it then becomes messy trying to run actual pledge data for revenue reports. Plus, many planned gifts are percentage-based so you don't know an exact dollar amount or a “due date” to set the pledge to complete.
  

Jaclyn Whitelock

@Faith Murray late to the conversation, but I'm saving your this for later as planned giving is something that we would like to track more intentionally- thank you! I'm curious, do you also use proposals alongside the PG module in your process?

(Also, silly question for anyone who does use the module- if I can see the gift type of “Planned Gift” when going to enter a gift, that means we have the module, correct? I've never used it, but I do see that the other fields in the gift change if planned gift is chosen as the type)

Austen Brown

@Jaclyn Whitelock - If you can see “Planned Gift” as an option in the gift type field, you have the module.

Faith Murray

@Jaclyn Whitelock, in theory, yes. We use Proposals any time there is a deliberate, major solicitation by a fundraiser to a donor. So, we use Proposals if our CEO is “popping the question” for a $100K pledge (or planned gift), but we don't use them for mundane direct mail appeals or for “incidental” gifts where the donor initiates (for example, sending in a card marked “I left you in my will”).

That being said, we run mostly “soft ask” planned giving campaigns, where a direct bequest solicitation on our part is few and far between. We specialize in prospect targeting with information promotionals, where the donor then initiates and we follow up to confirm records. So in practice, most of our planned gifts don't have connected proposals.

Jaclyn Whitelock

@Austen Brown thank you! Good to know we have it in that case!