Katie, you can only reports 65+ gifts to the VSE, but I recommend counting planned gifts differently for recognition and stewardship purposes.
Recognition and stewardship counts are intended to incentivize behaviors among gift officers and donors. If you count planned gifts for crediting your gift officers, you'll get more planned gifts, and generally, a more holistic conversation about total philanthropy and alignment with a donor's overall philanthropic goals. If you recognize donors for certain types of gifts, donors will be more interested in giving in those ways. The research shows pretty consistently that bequest intentions are not capstone gifts, they're opening gifts, and that substantially younger donors are quite open to making these commitments. The results of counting at younger ages are broadly positive and substantial.
In practice, the younger you count, the longer the timeline will be before gifts mature. If you shift to a policy of counting from 55 or 45, you're going to see bigger numbers up-front, but the percentage of the value of your portfolio of bequest that matures into realized estate distributions will be small. You'll get lots of new gifts, but the number of realized gifts won't change much at first, and the percentage will therefore look small. It's important to prepare leaders for that change, and to realize it may take 10+ years for your reporting numbers to mature, and for those metrics to reach a new equilibrium.
Unfortunately, maintaining multiple counting regimes can be difficult and confusing, so defaulting to 65+ is likely your best option if there is not an accompanying strategic conversation about bequests.
Thank you,
Isaac Shalev
Data Strategy Expert
Sage70, Inc.
(917) 859-0151
isaac@sage70.com
Schedule a 30-minute consultation now:
Original Message:
Sent: 8/30/2023 5:48:00 PM
From: Katie Bokenkamp
Subject: Counting Planned Gifts Outside of Campaign
Hi all,
We are trying to figure out the recommendations for counting planned gifts outside of a campaign. Within our campaign, we have been using the guideline of "if the donor will be 65 years old by the end of our campaign" we count that planned gift towards our campaign and in our total commitments for that year. After this campaign ends, we are wondering what the guideline is for counting planned gifts in our yearly totals outside of the campaign. Would it just be if the donor is 65 within the next year? Would love to hear your thoughts on this!
------------------------------
Katie Bokenkamp
Willamette University
kbokenkamp@willamette.edu
------------------------------