I guess the different between revocable trusts and DAFs is that the individual is the legal donor on a revocable trust. Which is not to say that the people responsible for understanding and managing and developing giving wouldn't see it differently!
Setting up a record type of "Trust" sounds like the solution I was hoping for. Now to convince my colleagues.
Alan S. Hejnal (he/him)
Original Message:
Sent: 05-02-2025 02:15 PM
From: Dania Calandrino
Subject: Coding for Living Trusts, Family Trusts, Revocable Trusts
Hi Alan,
By the way.. We do create organization records for other trusts when the trust is the legal donor, like Irrevocable Trust, Family Trust, Charitable Remainder Trust, etc.,... And those are all coded the same: "Trust." If we created records for living and revocable trusts, they'd be lumped in the same category. Fortunately for me, we have not (yet) been asked to code the different trust types on a more granular level. I think if we went down that path, we'd want to understand why the detail is needed, before we could implement new guidelines for new codes.
When you talk about categorizing something as an organization, but wanting to treat it as a part of individual giving, couldn't that be said for any individual giving through their DAF, their business, trust, family foundation etc.? As I mentioned earlier, our constituent codes tell us what kind of entity the legal donor is, mostly for financial reasons, but our fundraising analytics may look at other gift data, like the campaign code or fund, for how it gets categorized from an FRP perspective. That could be one solution to put living trusts into the organization category while keeping the ability to classify their payments as "individual" gifts.
Thank you for the conversation, and have a great weekend =)
Dania
Original Message:
Sent: 5/2/2025 10:17:00 AM
From: Alan Hejnal
Subject: RE: Coding for Living Trusts, Family Trusts, Revocable Trusts
Thanks, Dania, that's helpful.
By Sponsoring Organization, I mean the public charity that hosts Donor Advised Funds, like the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund or the Community Foundation for Northern Virginia. We would (will) code those, respectively, as DAF Sponsoring Organization and a Community Foundation, and their respective funds are coded as Donor Advised Funds. There seems to be some tangles there, like, as you say, sponsoring organizations that provide branded DAF services to other financial institutions, which may or may not be the same thing as DAFs that seem to act in turn as sponsoring organizations, but I'm mostly happy with how we organize that data.
Moving away from DAFs, we do treat estates as person entities, generally using the entity created during the person's lifetime, if we have such a record. It sounds like you do something similar for Living Trusts and Revocable Trusts.
But I was thinking that I'd heard advice here that, since a Living Trust or Revocable Trust was a separate legal entity, even though the individual is the legal donor, it should have its own record. Fair enough. What I'm trying to understand that, if we do so, how we should organize and categorize that record. Creating separate records would also facilitate analytics on gifts made through such entities.
Working backwards from the categories where we want gifts from such entities to appear, it may be that we want them to flow into the gifts from individuals category, since the individual is considered the legal donor. Both our current CRM and The CRM That Is To Come make a fundamental divide, in the data, between people and organizations. Putting a Living Trust into the people category locates it in a data structure that doesn't really fit very well. So perhaps we put it into the organization category, and use reporting functionality to treat is as part of individual giving? Those are the sorts of issues that I'm trying to work through!
Thanks again!
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Alan S. Hejnal (he/him)
Smithsonian Institution
Washington DC
hejnala@si.edu
Original Message:
Sent: 05-01-2025 04:17 PM
From: Dania Calandrino
Subject: Coding for Living Trusts, Family Trusts, Revocable Trusts
Hi Alan,
Some of the constituent codes we use include, DAFs, Trusts, Foundations, Family Foundations, and Estates. At our organization, the constituent code drives what account the gift is deposited into in our financial system. The constituent code is defined by what type of entity the gift is coming from, even when the entity's name may sound like another type of donating institution. Two nomenclature examples: 1. We have a record for the Chicago Community Foundation, which is coded as a DAF. That record is used to record gifts we receive via a DAF at that institution. 2. If we receive bequests from an individual's trust that was set up for estate planning purposes, that record is coded as Estate even though it may have "trust" in the name.
We will utilize separate records if an institution's complexity calls for it. For example, Chicago Community Foundation is an affiliate of Chicago Community Trust, and we maintain separate constituent records to record gifts from the Foundation (coded as DAF) and the trust ( coded as Trust.)
I wasn't sure if this is what you meant by a sponsoring organization, but on that topic, we are aware that DAF institutions provide branded DAF services to other financial institutions. For example, we may receive a gift from "a DAF of the Northern Trust Charitable Giving Program, a program of the Chicago Community Foundation" - in those cases we understand that the legal donor is the Chicago Community Foundation. (We called them.) We do not have a code for the "Northern Trust Charitable Giving Program" because we don't record their involvement in the gift.
We do not use codes for Living Trusts and Revocable Trusts, because we consider the individual to be the legal donor in those situations, so they would be coded "Individual."
I'm happy to talk through any of this in greater detail, if you're interested.
Thank you,
Dania
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Dania Calandrino
Art Institute of Chicago
dcalan@artic.edu
Original Message:
Sent: 04-30-2025 01:32 PM
From: Alan Hejnal
Subject: Coding for Living Trusts, Family Trusts, Revocable Trusts
Anyone? Anyone? Living Trusts? (Bueller?)
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Alan S. Hejnal (he/him)
Smithsonian Institution
Washington DC
hejnala@si.edu
Original Message:
Sent: 04-24-2025 11:15 AM
From: Alan Hejnal
Subject: Coding for Living Trusts, Family Trusts, Revocable Trusts
Bumping this question. Be interested in hearing your policies/practices.
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Alan S. Hejnal (he/him)
Smithsonian Institution
Washington DC
hejnala@si.edu
Original Message:
Sent: 04-18-2025 11:19 AM
From: Alan Hejnal
Subject: Coding for Living Trusts, Family Trusts, Revocable Trusts
Hi all. Happy Friday.
I'd like to get a sense of the community on a question that's come up in the context of our implementation of a new CRM.
We have a number of entities with names like The <family name> Family Trust, The <name> Living Trust, The <name> Revocable Trust, The <name> Trust, and various other variants.
Obviously, "Trust" covers a wide semantic field, from corporations like The New Mexico Bank and Trust to public charities like the American Farmland Trust to private foundations of various sorts (operating or grant-making). Mostly I think that we have those sorted out, and we can use the IRS Tax Exempt Organizations search to sort out the trusts that are actual foundations or other exempt organizations.
My question is how your organizations sort out the living trusts and family trusts and revocable trusts and individual trusts and charitable trusts and so on that aren't Exempt Organizations per the IRS. I have reason to suspect that we are not consistent as we categorize these: other organizations, family foundations, independent foundations, estates, individuals.
How are you segmenting these various entities that use the name "trust"? How are you making distinctions? Would it make sense to create their own type code?
Thanks in advance.
Alan
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Alan S. Hejnal (he/him)
Smithsonian Institution
Washington DC
hejnala@si.edu
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