documenting reciprocal (mirror) wills for couples without double-counting legacy gifts

Endora Fan

What is the best practice for documenting reciprocal (mirror) wills in Raiser’s Edge NXT.

e.g. A married couple has reciprocal wills. Each spouse leaves their entire estate to the surviving spouse. Only if the spouse predeceases them does a percentage of the estate pass to our charity. Functionally, this results in one contingent bequest, realized only upon the death of the second spouse.

In NXT, do you record this as one planned gift linked to one spouse, with the other spouse receiving soft credit, rather than creating two planned gifts?

How do you document this to ensure accurate legacy donor counts and pipeline reporting, while still recognizing both spouses?

Crystal Bruce

Tagging in All-Stars @Austen Brown and/or @Carlene Johnson to see if they have insight!

JoAnn Strommen

We would record on one spouse's record - one determined to have closest relationship to org.

Yes, soft-credit it, make notation of facts, when one spouse passes, move planned gift record to surviving spouse record. We generally include both spouse names for lists and reports.

Carlene Johnson

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/310339#Comment_310339

I echo JoAnn’s approach and will add a layer I see across most organizations I work with. Many track their legacy society through both the planned gift record and a custom field (attribute). There are plenty of situations where someone qualifies for your legacy society but you don’t yet have enough (or the right kind of) information to create a planned gift record in RE. In those situations, the custom field (attribute) is what keeps your tracking consistent.

For reciprocal or mirror wills, that means you would:

• Record one planned gift on the spouse with the closest relationship to your organization
• Apply a soft credit to the other spouse
• Add the legacy society custom field to both records for recognition, listing, and stewardship purposes

For accurate legacy society member counts, you can report directly off the custom field. That gives you the true number of individuals who have made a legacy commitment without double-counting the gift. If your organization prefers to count them at the household level instead, you can still report off the custom field but limit the count to constituents marked Head of Household.

Some organizations also use Opportunities/Proposals to track planned giving activity. That can be another helpful layer for pipeline reporting, especially when you want visibility into cultivation work even before a formal planned gift record exists.

Austen Brown

Adding to JoAnn and Carlene, recommend putting this in with a $0.00 amount since the amount is contingent on a variety of factors and is therefore unknown. Completely agree with the other points made.