Planned Giving Estates in BBCRM

David Webb

Hello all.

Our institution is 2.5 months live on BBCRM and are now getting into the weeds of how to do more complicated Gift processing, in particular Realized Planned Gifts. Were looking for Best Practices for how you link the original Opportunity to the Transaction, especially if you use a separate Estate Constituent. So:

• Does you shop create a separate Estate Constituent when the Individual with the Planned Gift Commitment passes?
• If not, why not? Is it easier to make sure the Bequest Payment gets linked to the Planned Gift Opportunity that way, or are there other reasons?
• If you do, how do you link the Transaction Payment on the Planned Gift to the Opportunity on the Individual? Does the Gift Processor, when they are processing the Transaction on the Organization Estate Constituent, have to search up the Opportunity on the Individual (kind of like having one constituent pay down another constituent's pledge…)? Does that have an increased Risk of having that link missed? Do you link the Estate to the Individual as a Plan Participant on the Plan record, or some other way? Or do you have a better way of doing it that reduces Risk?

Any insight from you veteran BBCRM users would be appreciated. Thanks!

Christine Robertson

@David Webb This is what I recommend to my clients because it makes it very straightforward to send giving reports for the estate separate from the individual. It also allows for more functionality to track the estate contacts.

Clint Grossnickle

@David Webb, My recommendation is to create a separate estate constituent organization record for realized planned gifts. This is the workflow I generally advise using. If the planned gift is known to the institution while the constituent is still living, then add the planned gift record to the record of the individual constituent. If there is an opportunity, then link the prospect plan that has that opportunity to the planned gift record. When the planned gift from the estate is received, then create the estate organization constituent record and relate the deceased constituent (and surviving spouse if applicable) to the estate record. If you use a specific recognition type for Estate giving, then apply the recognition default to the relationship. Next, process the transaction from the estate and link the opportunity from the record of the decedent. This will require gift processing to search for the opportunity on the record of the individual. Use the same process to relate and soft credit individual constituents that are known to you as an organization, but the planned gift intention was not documented. When this occurs, gift processing can skip linking the prospect plan and opportunity since they do not exist. When a planned gift from an estate is received and no constituent record exists for the decedent, then typically only an estate record is created and no individual record for the decedent nor relationship to the estate is required.

David Webb

@Christine Robertson
When you set up the separate Org Constituent do you a) create another Planned Giving Prospect Assignment on that Org (thus having the Assignment on both the Deceased Individual and the Org Estate b) move the Assignment from the Individual to the Org (i.e. End Date or Delete the Assignment on the Individual and move it to the Org) and only have the Assignment on the Estate Org or c) leave the Assignment on the Individual and don't put any Assignment on the Estate Ogr?

Christine Robertson

@David Webb Generally, I create the Org after the Ind has passed away so I would leave the assignment on the individual (unless there's a compelling reason to add it to the Org). The estate giving is set at that time so I'm not sure you'd need to assign to the org.