Planned Giving- Keep Your Income Flowing

At a recent planned giving event, Tom Waters, Vice President of Charitable Planning at the Community Foundation of Sarasota shared that planned giving efforts often ebbed and flowed in nonprofits organizations.

As someone who helps nonprofits to make dramatic improvements in their effectiveness, I asked Waters for his suggestions on how we can institutionalize planned giving to avoid these ups and downs. In a busy nonprofit, it is too easy to get busy, drop planned giving efforts and in the hiatus miss a $250,000 gift.

To institutionalize planned giving, Waters suggested:
1. Designing your planned giving work to create future and current gifts.
2. Involving the Executive Director. Waters recommended that this be a significant part of their job descriptions and measured in their evaluation. While planned giving efforts need Board support, Waters believes the key leader is the executive director.
3. Adopting a long-term vision about planned giving.


Are you serious about planned giving? Are you serious about creating a planned giving program that lasts? Build your program around these elements.

If you seek additional information about obtaining income for your nonprofit, red this article: How Will We Pay for This? 14 Ways to Obtain Income.

Do Nonprofits Partner Enough?

Last Thursday while leading a Manatee Human Services Network training session on the Power of Partnerships, I conducted an index card survey of the 60 participants. The goal was to compute the number of their current partnerships. The total? 1,076.

Do you often hear that your nonprofit needs to cooperate more? If so, to respond with strength, tally the number of your partnerships and share it often. For instance, “Did you know that we are already involved in 47 partnerships of various sorts? We’re always interested to learn more about potential partners –who do you have in mind?”

We need to educate the community about the highly cooperative nature of nonprofits. What’s your number?

Your Non Profit's Playing Field

Have you examined who is on your non profit's playing field lately?

It's logical to consider your board on your playing field. They are the people ensuring the mission and vision of the organization are carried out. But you must also consider who else should be there and either enlarge the field or ask them to step onto the field from the sidelines.

Staff and volunteers are part of the field, although some may feel that they are relegated to the sidelines if they are not invited to be part of the action and decision-making. Ensure that the field has room for everyone's intellectual and creative contributions as well as their community connections. Enlarge your field to ensure your players are helping you achieve your goals.

Laura Mikuska

Mikuska Group

www.mikuska.com

Creating Clairvoyant Board Members

Do you wish your board members could read your mind? If so, you may wish to read and share an article that appears on Charity Channel’s website this month. It lists a dozen thoughts nonprofit leaders often think during board meetings that they wish their board members knew. It also suggests board members actions.

Here’s one more additional “thought.”
“Listen to the community for us.” Sometimes, as a board member, you learn things no one else knows. Action: Share this information and your insights to help our nonprofit understand the community’s response to our work and take actions to use this knowledge to our advantage.

Stuck on Nonprofit Goals?

Does your nonprofit struggle with setting goals? Next time you embark on a goal setting exercise, consider adopting the following four universal nonprofit needs as a framework:

1. Create great mission outcomes
2. Develop leadership
3. Provide resources to create great mission outcomes
4. Develop realistic future strategies to do more of the above

You can use these goals to build a strategic planning session. And, you can also use them to measure your current status with the following.

Where do you stand on each? To find out, use this quick exercise at your next board meeting. On the 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being the highest, ask your board members to privately rank your organization’s achievement of these goals by placing a number of an index card you distribute for each area. Collect the card and post the results. Discuss: What reactions do you have to our results? What do our ranking tell us about what we need to do next? Are we investing in the right priorities? Do we invest adequate time on them?

For more reading on the topic of creating successful nonprofits, see: Karen’s Ten Steps to Create a World-Class Program.

Use Your Vision to Find Untapped Resources

The March 22 edition of Philanthropy Journal featured an article with the headline, Business partnerships seen boosting nonprofit causes. But, how do nonprofits identify the most appropriate partnerships? They can start by turning to their vision statements.

A well-written vision statement will have a community focus, that is, instead of speaking to how the organization will be seen – e.g., as the best, most successful, well recognized, etc. – it points to the impact it promises to make in the community. Most organizations have vision statements that actually reflect several such strategic impacts. For instance, a senior care facility might have a vision that commits to providing a warm, caring and safe environment where seniors requiring some level of outside support are able to spend their days living with dignity and respect at their full potential. In this case, the strategic impacts are 1) providing a warm, caring and safe environment for seniors; 2) helping seniors that require some level of outside support; and, 3) ensuring that these seniors have the opportunity to live to their fullest potential with dignity and respect.

Begin by identifying the strategic impacts in your vision statement. Then, for each, brainstorm those businesses or institutions that might also be interested in, or would benefit from, having a similar impact. In our example, those that might be interested in warm, caring and safe environments could include the police, security companies, other senior care facilities, real estate developers, families facing the need to find somewhere to place a loved one, families that had a bad experience when placing a loved one and who don’t want anyone else to go through something similar, doctors that know that their older patients do better – live longer and healthier – in such environments, nurses, home health companies, those that run training programs for nurses aides, and so on. Stretch. Get creative when listing possibilities.

After you have identified as many broad categories as possible for each strategic impact, determine which have the greatest capability to serve as a good strategic partner and/or to provide resources to your organization. Plug each of these types of businesses into a search engine such as Google, along with “vision” or “vision statement” and the words that make up your strategic intent. What will return are the specific businesses that share your beliefs, concerns and commitment. You now have several entities to approach and a common bond from which to start a conversation.

Avoid going in with hand outstretched. Research what their needs are and ask for an appointment to discuss how you might help each other accomplish your shared vision. Focus on advice – not money – at least at the beginning. People are almost always willing to offer intellectual capital. That often leads to money or gifts in kind however once they get to know your organization and become invested in it. In any case, your organization has successfully begun the important process of community engagement. That will bring its own rewards (the subject of another blog!).

Thanks to my colleague Steve Bowman of Conscious Governance in Australia for generously sharing this concept.

Karen’s Facts of Life about Money

Do you need more cash for your nonprofit? Nonprofit leaders always answer yes to that question. This month’s Added Value, a monthly newsletter for nonprofits, contains a dozen facts about nonprofit money. Here are two from the lead article:

3. Know Thy Sources
Individual contributions are fabulous because of their flexibility, but
the majority of nonprofit income year-to-year is earned income. Action: Know the sources of your organization's income and how they compare to nonprofits in general (see Where Do Nonprofits Derive Funding? and Where Do Nonprofits, Except Healthcare, Derive Funding?) This knowledge will help you to make faster and more effective decisions about resource development.

10. Easy Money
Along the way, you will obtain some easy money. Easy money is an exception to the rule -that proves the rule. After you win at the easy money cash machine, avoid lingering around it for another hit. Too many organizations waste resources trying to get easy money sources to produce again. True opportunities follow consistent and proven preparations. Action: Undertake consistent actions to increase your income from sources that consistently provide nonprofit income.

For the rest click here.