In February, the IRS discount rate was 1.6%. In December, it is up to 5.2%, more than triple what it was just ten months ago. This dramatic change coincides with a similar escalation of interest rates in the U.S. generally, as well as increased nervousness over whether the rapid rise in interest rates might soon tip the economy into a recession.

Don’t freak out over the swift shift in economic conditions. View it as an opportunity. This is a great time to renew contact with your donors and educate them about gift plans they might want to consider in this new economic reality.

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.

I once worked with a geologist who suggested that planned giving could take some valuable lessons from the field of geomorphology. Both geology and planned giving involve dynamic relationships that change slowly over time and processes that are not readily amenable to experimentation or precise measurement. Both fields are cursed with uncertainty and complexity with long periods of small incremental change punctuated by large-scale events. And geologists and planned giving officers must wrestle with expectations that they should be able to precisely predict events that are stubbornly unpredictable.

Over the years, much has been written about “metrics” for planned giving programs. At first blush, it seems simple: just count the money as it comes in. However, tying results to current activity is more complicated when it comes to planned gifts.

For many shops, particularly those with a June 30th fiscal year, fundraising activity hits a slump in the dog days of summer. Your donors are taking hard-earned vacations or may even be away at a second home for the summer, making them hard to reach. Hopefully your staff is using some vacation time to rest and recharge. If you’re experiencing a lull in proposal drafting and donor visits in July and August, but your finance team has not yet roped you into annual reporting responsibilities, here is some PG housekeeping that can be attended to in this quiet time.

The world of planned giving is complex and fascinating. It is squarely at the intersection of philanthropy and estate planning, but it also overlaps with the areas of law, taxation, investments, and human behavior. There are so many nuances and specialty areas of knowledge that the gift planning professional can easily become overwhelmed and lose sight of the core issues. We at PG Calc hesitate to say, “we’ve seen it all,” but in some ways, we have!

We produce software for gift planning and gift administration, and we provide a wide array of services ranging from consulting to web services. We thought it might be helpful to pause for a moment and share what we’ve identified as the top 10 lessons (this is the first installment of 5) in planned giving that we have learned over the 37 years of our company’s existence. These are not necessarily in order of importance or relevance, and of course, they represent only a tiny portion of the knowledge required for any modern-day gift planner.

The world of planned giving is complex and fascinating. It is squarely at the intersection of philanthropy and estate planning, but it also overlaps with the areas of law, taxation, investments, and human behavior. There are so many nuances and specialty areas of knowledge that the gift planning professional can easily become overwhelmed and lose sight of the core issues. We at PG Calc hesitate to say, “we’ve seen it all,” but in some ways, we have!

We produce software for gift planning and gift administration, and we provide a wide array of services ranging from consulting to web services. We thought it might be helpful to pause for a moment and share what we’ve identified as the top 10 lessons (this is the first installment of 5) in planned giving that we have learned over the 37 years of our company’s existence. These are not necessarily in order of importance or relevance, and of course, they represent only a tiny portion of the knowledge required for any modern-day gift planner.