At some point in your fundraising career, you will be asked to pull a rabbit out of a hat. You will deal with a donor who wakes up on December 15th with a burning desire to establish a $1M lead trust, or to establish a charitable remainder trust with mutual funds, or make an outright gift of real estate. And in the eager donor’s mind, these should all be easily doable for your charity by year end ‒ after all, you’ve got two whole weeks to pull it off!

While we can’t guarantee a successful mutual fund transfer into a CRT after December 15th (we’re magicians, not miracle workers), we do have a suggestion for handling the last-minute, year-end, Hail Mary pass of an outright gift of real estate.