Discover Gift Planning and Management
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the common challenges with planning and managing alumni gifts.
- Explain the gift planning process in Fundraising.
- Discuss how Fundraising simplifies gift transactions and processing.
You’ve now learned how research goes a long way in helping you pinpoint strong candidates for engagement, align to donor interests, and determine possible gift amounts. The next step is securing the gift.
Following the research phase, you’re ready to engage the alum to gauge their interest in giving, lay out possible opportunities and options, and understand the impact that they’d like to make. If this engagement is successful, you and the alum arrive at an agreement on how to move forward with the contribution. For long-term gifts, you schedule and manage ongoing payments and individual installments.
Because of the variety and complexity of gifts, which sometimes includes charitable trusts, gift annuities, and bequests, financial planning and gift intake processes have long been a persistent obstacle for academic institutions. It’s important for the advancement staff to comply with regulatory guidelines, ensure proper stewardship of the funds, and keep an accurate record of all transactions. Due to technological constraints and lack of system integration, gift processing often involves loads of manual data entry across multiple spreadsheets, which leads to errors and inefficiencies.
With Fundraising, you can systematically plan and process gifts of all shapes and sizes, and ensure that each contribution meets all the individual philanthropic goals of the donor.
In this unit, you explore how Agentforce Education helps you navigate the final, critical phases of fundraising: gift planning and management.
Gift Planning
The gift planning process can span multiple years, and involve a lot of back and forth communication with potential donors. Fundraising makes it easy to manage all the fine details as you guide alumni through each stage of the planning process.
When you find a potential donor through research and assessments, create gift concept records to plan out your fundraising proposals to the alum. These concepts help you to build a giving strategy that evolves with the donor over the long term, and sometimes span over the donor’s lifetime or even future generations.
In each concept, you record the estimated gift value, likelihood of donor commitment, and the timeframe for completing the gift. You can create multiple gift concepts, rank them in order of priority, and track the status of each concept as it proceeds through review by stakeholders and financial planners.
So far, Astro University’s Director of Alumni Engagement, Delaney, has discovered that Sophia is a high-potential donor and has a history of charitable contributions to the university. The next step is to develop gift concepts that outline various giving options for Sophia to consider. Here’s a Donor Gift Concepts record for Sophia.
Advancement staff can use approved concepts to present giving options to the alum, and help them decide the plan that best suits their giving capacity and preferences.
Alumni often opt to spread out large donations over the course of several years. After a donor tentatively agrees to pledging a gift, the advancement team member creates a planned gift record to store the details, including legal, financial, and strategic planning data. On planned gift records, you can define the total amount, payout rate, frequency, and duration.
For example, after several conversations with Sophia, Delaney uses the concepts that the research team have devised to present gift proposals of various amounts and timeframes. Luckily, Sophia shows strong interest in one of the concepts, a very generous gift of $500,000 to be paid out over the course of 20 years, from her family estate that has a value of $5,000,000.
Delaney excitedly creates a new planned gift record to document the specifics of Sophia’s donation.
On a planned gift record, you can define the type of gift, principle amount, and other important financial details.
Fundraising includes several objects for calculating and storing financial data related to the gift during the planning phase. Use actuarial entries to forecast the potential investment earnings based on expectancy and return rates. With planned gift performance records, measure the impact of the planned gift on your institution’s financial health and operational outcomes. Then, use a gift value forecast record to project the long-term value of the gift based on those assumptions and economic factors.
Fundraising even helps you manage financial benefits that you provide to donors for their philanthropic commitment, also known as annuities. The planned gift annuity rate object includes rate tables you can use to calculate income payments for these types of gift arrangements.
After the alum reviews the proposed concept and agrees to proceed with the planned gift, create a gift agreement to outline the terms and conditions. As part of the agreement, a few alumni request to receive some form of recognition, such as having their name engraved on a plaque, while others wish to remain anonymous. You can use gift stewardship and gift stewardship activity records to capture details about the alum’s acknowledgement preferences and other ongoing responsibilities related to the contribution.
Gift Management
Along with simplifying the research and gift planning phases, Fundraising accelerates all aspects of gift intake and processing through a variety of objects, tools, and automation.
For recurring donations and multiyear pledges, keep track of the promised amounts and installment schedule through a gift commitment record. Often, alumni want their financial gifts to be allocated to specific programs or campaigns that are important to them. You can set the distribution of a single gift across several programs by creating gift designations for the commitment.
For example, as part of her gift commitment, Sophia requests that her contribution be allocated among Astro University’s Business and Engineering programs, and a scholarship fund for young women. Delaney creates gift designations to distribute Sophia’s gifted funds accordingly.
Scheduled flows automate the processing of gift commitments and gift batches, and the creation of gift transaction records for each installment. Each gift transaction record stores information about the individual payment and connects to associated gift commitments, campaigns, and donors. You can apply campaign source codes or outreach source codes to connect campaigns with resulting gifts to measure the impact of your marketing, communication, and outreach approaches.
You’ve merely scratched the surface on what you can do with Fundraising. For example, you can efficiently manage all types of gifts, including soft credits, in-kind gifts, and of course, one-time payments made by alumni. Create comprehensive donor briefs and profiles, generate tax receipts and gift acknowledgement letters, gain useful insights with integrated dashboards, and much more.
To learn more, visit the Manage Fundraising with Agentforce Nonprofit trail on Trailhead. While the badges focus on Fundraising through the lens of nonprofit organizations, the same tools and techniques apply to advancement in education.
Wrap Up
By using Advancement and Alumni Relations, Delaney and her team have successfully rekindled their relationship with Sophia. As more and more graduates come back into the fold, Astro University can now confidently invest in its institutional growth and long-term stability.
In this badge, you learned how Agentforce Education helps you manage all of your advancement and alumni relations work through an online portal, apps, objects, and AI. With these solutions, you can bring your graduates together and garner the necessary support your institution needs to grow and succeed far into the future.