FundSvcs Community

Hello fellow listers,

Today, I present a situation I've never encountered and kindly seek your feedback.

• We are approaching a prospect after which to name our rare book museum.  The prospect is offering to donate his collection of rare books, art, etc... that is valued around $1 - $1.5 million in an irrevocable planned gift in exchange for our rare book room to be named after him.
• The prospect was a former university librarian who left in 2009.  In 2005 he made an in-kind donation of books valued around $30K to the Foundation for our rare book room that was officially processed, BUT NOW, we have come to learn, that according to the museum director, he also has "unofficially" donated many rare books to the collection between 2013 and present that were NOT recorded nor officially documented which upon internal expert review are currently valued between $3.0M - $3.5M.
• Curiously, our museum personnel didn't record the date each book was casually given to them from the donor so there's no way to know which were given prior to our current capital campaign (July 2020-current) and which were donated during.
• Our leadership wants to give this individual FY26 recognition credit for about $1M (a "guestimate" of what may have come in during our campaign) of this past "discovery" of in-kind donations, which would resultantly count in our current capital campaign.  Their rational being that, "the discovery of a gift is more relevant than when the gift was made, and since we just discovered these donations in FY26 they can count [some reasonable amount] in FY26 numbers."  
• There is no intent to record it as hard credit or provide any tax receipts.

IMO, giving recognition credit only is fine, but having this in-kind donation windfall from the past fall on our lap and now being able to claim a significant portion of it as having occurred during our campaign seems wrong if not odd.  Would appreciate any insights, wisdom, and defense of why counting this $1M per CASE is OK or not OK.

Thanks

Thanks John.  What do you mean, "the full amount reconstructed can be counted in the campaign?"  Are you saying that, if the library works with the donor to determine that $X was given during the campaign, we should credit him and count that $X amount regardless of whether it's higher or lower than our $1M guestimate?

I probably should've mentioned earlier, the number of items given was over 2,300 so I'm likely to get pushback on dragging the donor into an assessment of dating that many items... even if approximately.  I know, I know, we can't make this stuff up.

Thanks Amy.  Not a bad idea.  Maybe there is a log somewhere about something having to do with these books, however, these are not books you check out.  They're part of our rare book museum.  At most, visitors may be able to peruse them in the room.  I've been there and there isn't a log of visitors, but I also didn't ask to look at a rare book, so not sure if they log visitors who look at books.  I could ask. Thanks again!