Planned Giving Team Annual Check List

Building a Foundation

Building a foundation for a comprehensive planned giving program will eliminate preventable misunderstandings and in fighting. A strong foundation includes a Gift Policy and Endowment By-laws. The program’s foundation should be built on transparency, best practice, and consensus building. It should have clear expectations, eliminate conflicts of interest, and support the mission and vision of the congregation.  Our GSB consultant will walk alongside the Planned Giving Taskforce from creation to approval. Often, congregations stall out or argue over the creation of Gift Policies and Endowment By-laws and as a result, planned giving programs never take off. Without a GSB consultant the average time for a congregation to establish a gift policy and by-laws exceeds 18 months. With a GSB consultant, your congregation can have consensus and approval on both of these critical elements in less than 3 months.

To establish the program we will do the following:

• Schedule Gift Policy Review Team of 5 people for 1.5 hours

• Schedule Endowment By-Laws Team of 5 people for 2 hours

• Begin collecting stories

• Build a communications calendar

• Build a way to gather and track names for gratitude and institutional knowledge

• Schedule the Planned Giving Workshop

• Donors begin meeting with Gift Planner

• Gratitude process goes into effect

• Continue storytelling

• Schedule annual gift planning workshop in the fall and spring