I am seeking input regarding the use of Funds for planned gifts.
*Does your organization restrict planned gifts to Endowment or Operating expenses?
*In either case, what is your Campaign/Fund structure?
*Does your department differentiate between the various types of giving vehicles using Funds or within your financial tracking software?
For my part, I have seen a couple of different systems. In one system, the Campaign/Fund were the same as any other endowment gift, and the only way tracking the giving vehicle was via Appeal. Another system had separate endowment/operating Campaigns for planned gifts, with corresponding Funds for the specific giving vehicle (bequest, IRA, etc) and whether or not the principal of the gift was restricted. I assume that much of an organization's setup has to do with Finance Department buy-in, as well as Development needs.
Thoughts on any of those questions, or on your use of Tessitura in support of planned giving efforts in general, would be very much appreciated!
Thank you,
Cate
Cate,
We have one campaign for Planned Giving and a separate one for Endowment. Since we consider Endowment permanently restricted, we like to keep it completely separate from all other devo income.
Within our Planned Giving campaign we have separate funds for purpose restrictions (GOS, VOX Festival, Education), however the vast majority goes to the GOS fund.
The different types of planned gifts are differentiated through sources (in an Appeal). We have the following outside sources in the Planned Giving Appeal:
PG-Bequest
PG-Lead Trust
PG-Remainder Trust
PG-Gift Annuity
PG-Real Estate
PG-IRA Disbursement
Recently I have also been asked to enter endowment contributions into Tessitura. We have not done so in the past since our endowment is actually its own foundation with its own 510(c)(3) designation, etc. Have others entered this type of contribution with that type of back story? SDS business practices to date have used the database as annual fund contributions (devo) or ticket revenue (marketing) only.
There are several questions....Can we use tessitura for this since the endowment is its on institution. Would security restrictions be an affective way to restrict the viewing for most staff members? Does our IT department need to do anything different (aside from security restrictions) to insure the separation of the two 501(c)(3) entities or does it matter? Can I assume that the gifts would be back dated to the receipt of the gift (perhaps as much as 10 years)? Have auditors been happy/confused with the process?
Is it as complicated as we are trying to make it? Our finance department is just as interested in these results as I am......