How to Involve Your Board in Planned Giving

How to Involve Your Board in Planned Giving

It is very important to understand how to involve your board in planned giving. You could very likely have a successful staff driven legacy program, but you also need your board’s involvement to really shine.  

If you have a staff driven program, you can get things done only at a certain level. However, if you have the board involved, your program will become drastically stronger and better. Quite frankly, when your board is involved, you will get gifts much quicker. It really is a big boost in the first year or two of your program, as your board will not only be making gifts, but also asking for them. 

Way to Boost Board Involvement

A lot of times you may have a board that gives you the green-light to create a legacy giving program but then they don’t actually want to be involved in it. They don't want to do the work. They would rather it be staff driven, even though they think the concept is great. 

So, let's talk about how you get your board involved. Number one-- Pitch the idea at a meeting when you're starting to launch your program. Find one person on your board that is a proponent of legacy giving, whether they've done a gift or not, whether they are on your development committee, or a professional advisor that can speak about legacy giving. It doesn't have to be the chair of the board. It does not have to be the chair of the development committee. You want someone willing to be that champion to pitch it at a meeting and convey that this is important to your organization. 

Moving Forward

You need them to oversee your programs. In managing a successful, sustainable legacy giving program, you have things that must be approved by the board. You'll have gift acceptance policies that need to be approved by the board, or you may want to do a gift annuity program.  You need to have your board involved because they need to oversee the fiscal responsibility that you have towards this program. This is great for board members that don't feel comfortable asking for gifts and doing the solicitations, but would be comfortable at oversight. 

Get Them Involved

Match a few people on your board to something related to planned giving, such as marketing, and get them involved in that respect. Another way to get them involved is, of course, having them actually make a gift, or some sort of legacy intent. It could be a current legacy gift, like an endowment gift, or it could be an intent to do a gift in the future through their estate planning or a specific bequest.

Soliciting Donors

Soliciting donors is a task that not a lot of board members are comfortable doing. If you have board members that are comfortable making an ask, make it as easy as possible for them to ask for gifts. A lot of board members say they'll do it and then are too busy to follow through. Therefore, sometimes it's not the motivation to actually ask, it is just that time is an issue.  Since these are relationship-built gifts it may be easier for your board member to develop the relationship and bring someone else in for the ask. 

Fiscal Oversight

Another important aspect to keep in mind is the fiscal oversight of your program. As a legacy giving program, you will be getting many gifts, current and future. Someone needs to be on top of recording these gifts, and managing the assets. A lot of this will come down to your fiscal department as well as oversight of the board reviewing all of these gift vehicles. 

So, these are different ways to get your board involved with planned giving. Don't let them just remain on the sidelines and say that it's up to you to do everything. You need both the staff and leaders to build legacy.