Imagine that your planned giving program is growing, focused on the pipeline and not just current receipts, and that your organization is fully committed to sustaining the effort for the long haul. Sounds like a dream come true, but probably not your current reality, right? Well, the National Association for Charitable Gift Planners ("CGP") aims to prove reality wrong and that dreams can be real.
Unveiled at the CGP 2020 Conference this month, The National Standards for Gift Planning Success ("NSGPS" or "Standards") are designed to help you engineer a successful planned giving program. Much more than a just simple list of best practices, the NSGPS is a comprehensive toolkit to help identify and overcome challenges that may be hindering your gift planning efforts. The Standards are not prescriptive and are scalable to the size and maturity of your program, allowing you to adapt and address current needs while building on your strengths
The Standards have been developed by a task force of gift planners with experience in a wide variety of gift planning programs who identified the essential elements of successful planned giving programs and distilled their findings into the NSGPS. The sixteen standards are divided into three key categories:
- support from the top – an organizational structure that endures for long-term success;
- ability and capacity to execute – including the right staff and appropriate resources;
- donor-centric engagement and management – to ensure that donors remain committed.
Each standard provides a description of best practices, a set of indicators and a self-assessment tool to gauge your progress, and an extensive list of relevant articles and other resources.
You can access the National Standards for Gift Planning Success on the CGP website. In addition to the text of the Standards, you will find tutorials, self-guided analysis tools, and extensive links of resources. CGP intends that the Standards will evolve over time to mirror changes in the gift planning world, and the web site offers opportunities to participate in future research and development of the tools.
Gift planners know that planned gifts are the ultimate gifts donors make: many times larger than the largest annual gift, often in the form of assets rather than cash, and that other giving usually increases after a donor makes a planned gift commitment. The National Standards for Gift Planning Success can help you make sure your donors have opportunities to make their ultimate gifts.
