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

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.