The Power of Planned Giving

I’ve read in many different publications about the wealth transfer occurring in the next two decades. Some estimates are as much as $75 trillion will be passed from one generation to the next. And yet, in nonprofits, I’m always staggered by the lack of emphasis on planned giving.

Consider what happened in Wilmer, Minnesota. A long-time church congregant of the Calvary Lutheran Church left farmland to the church upon his passing. If you live in the Midwest or on a farm, you might start asking some questions. However, for most who live in more urban dwellings, it may not mean much. The church’s natural reaction, appropriately so, was to take this wonderful gift and sell it. How much did it go for? $4.5 million. And that’s enough to change the church for decades to come.

Nonprofits, especially so in more challenging economic times, concentrate so much on cash gifts. And I’m a fan of cash.  But that’s not where the real money is. When somebody believes in a nonprofit, they may want to give but financially can’t. The farmland is the perfect example. During that farmer’s life, he needed that farmland to live, plant crops, harvest the crops, take the crops to market, bring the cash back to the farm, buy more seed, and do the same thing over and over year after year. However, once he passed, the value of the church in his life shines and he doesn’t need the farmland anymore. Think about this in terms of retirement funds and houses and cars and other assets people acquire in life, who need them during life, but not later. Many people are saying they don’t want to leave everything to their children.

Nonprofit should be spending 25% of their time, at a minimum, talking about planned giving with the people who believe in them and their missions. Not everyone’s going to make that kind of gift, but it only takes a small percentage to create a legacy in their estates to change an organization, one which they believed in during life, for generations to come.