Estate Admin in Proposals in RE

Adriana Cavell
Adriana Cavell
Fifth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions
I do Estate administration for a hospital foundation. We have approx. 70 open Estates at any given time. Despite my love of RE, I have been using an Excel spreadsheet to track things like ongoing updates, fund designation, and expected gift amount. As a Foundation, we're really trying to do away with spreadsheets and keep all our data in RE. We already track out Planned Giving prospects and donors in Proposals so I'm attempting to put Estates in there as well. I've run into a few problems and I'm hoping that the wise folks here will be able to help me out.


Fund :
  • There is the Fund option in Proposals but it seems like you can only put one fund in there at a time. I'm not sure what to do for cases where the gift is designated to multiple funds.
  • Sometimes a fund will need to be created once the gift is received so I can use TBD in the Fund field but I'm not sure where to track the details about the gift designation (proposal attribute perhaps?).
Gift Amounts:
  • There are two options for tracking gift amounts in our version of Proposals: "Ask/Anticipated Ask" and "Expected $ in FY". The first is used by Major Gifts for the amount asked and the second is obviously the amount we are anticipating receiving in the fiscal. We also have a Rating field with percentages of likelihood of receiving the gift.
  • In my spreadsheet, I have 3 columns which I use to track the Estate pipeline: 1) "Incoming Gift this FY" (for Estates where the release has been signed and returned, and we know the gift is imminent), 2) "Guess Estimate this FY" (when I've made a calculated guess that we will likely receive the gift this fiscal), and 3) "Future Gifts" (if an amount is known but it won't be received this fiscal).
  • For 1 and 2, I think I can use "Expected $ in FY" and use the percentages in Rating to indicate if they are imminent or a guess.
  • But I'm not sure how to track 3 amounts that are known but won't be coming this fiscal. There isn't an obvious place for it in the Proposal.
I'm very interested to hear how others use Proposals to track their Estate administration. Thanks in advance!

Comments

  • Austen Brown
    Austen Brown Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 PowerUp Challenge: Product Update Briefing Feedback Task 3 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    Hi Adriana - Does your organization have NXT/web view? Working with the version of proposals in web view, Opportunities, may be easier for you to keep track of all of this information.

    I agree with you that it is frustrating that the fund area cannot be split, but make sure you check out the RE NXT Idea Bank and add this idea if it does not already exist. We currently leave this field blank for estate gifts, and denote that they are estate gifts in the Summary Note section of Opportunities.

    I agree that two of the three elements you mentioned for keeping track of funding and timing, can be tracked in the expected date/amt fields. You could even track the expected FY date in the deadline field, but it really depends on how your organization uses this field. For the remaining data points, you could always have a custom field/attribute where you track that additional information.

    Tracking Estates in Proposals/Opportunities is not exactly perfect, but with the use of custom fields/attributes you can definitely make this work and be able to track everything you need within the database.

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