Gearing up for Planned Giving or HCC

Mhm Hello everyone and thank you for having me here

today to speak with you about my proposal for a

planned giving program at Historic Congressional Cemetery.

As you all are aware, I will be taking up

the mantle of president of this organization on November one

and one of the goals of my presidency will be

to create and implement a plan giving program at historic

congressional cemetery today.

I want to start by talking to you about why

we need such a program.

And then I want to discuss how that program can

unfold. What are the steps in creating a plan giving

program And finally, what does success look like for us?

So why planned giving and why HCC first?

I want to begin by saying that plan giving is

really making a commitment to give at a later date

to an organization.

What can you give?

You can give any of your assets.

There are many different types of things that one can

give as part of a plan giving program.

And sometimes it can get very complicated.

And as an organization with a small staff and limited

time and resources, we really need to focus on what

we can actually accomplish.

So you might be thinking to yourself if you've ever

heard of the term plan giving and you know how

small organization we are.

How can we really implement a plan giving program And

what is the point of doing it is deferred giving

really worth prioritizing and I'm going to argue today that

absolutely, it's worth doing.

There's a number of reasons why primarily because although we

are very fiscally sound and we have individual donations coming

in quite regularly.

We want to be able to plan for the long

term and planned giving is something that allows us to

have longevity, a peace of mind that we're going to

be funded for years to come Currently.

Historic Congressional cemetery racist funds in a variety of ways

by looking at your 990s and by looking at your

annual reports, I have deduced that you primarily have people

giving at the individual level that's done sporadically throughout the

year. That's also done with an annual fond appeal.

There's also grants corporate sponsorships, foundation support, a mix of

those things as well as sight sales and special programming

that bring in funds.

It seems that the program that brings in the most

funds for you currently is actually one that's done through

individuals through a membership program with your canine corps.

And this has a wait list as you all know.

And it has a number of people On it.

Um, I believe there's almost 800 dogs in dog owners

currently who are part of the membership program and they

each pay a couple of $100 which is then used

for the perpetual care of the cemetery.

So we do have that going on.

And that's a great thing and that certainly seems like

it's going to continue for some time, but should anything

arise where that could no longer sustain a lot of

the things that happened at the cemetery, a plan giving

program would certainly be a necessary backup.

So why is now the time for HTC to engage

in a plan giving program?

It's a great question.

There are a number of reasons why organizations put off

a planned giving program.

Usually it has to do with not having enough time

or resources or feeling like they need to have everything

together and tied up in a nice little bow before

they start.

And I've noticed a very thankfully that many of the

traits of HTC are very positive in that there's sound

fiscal management.

You all are very fiscally sound there, nobody's really hurting

for money.

There's not going to be a closure anytime soon.

And that's a great thing.

There's also this focus on individual donors and that's who

you're going to go to when you're trying to solicit

for your plan giving program.

And because you already have a successful individual donor program,

that's a really great place to build next.

And finally, and most importantly, HTC has a public perception

that there is trustworthy leadership there and trust is really

the whole point behind a plant giving program.

People will not give to you long term if they

don't trust you and don't trust the organization long term.

And so having that relationship is very important.

And when I say that there's a public perception of

trustworthiness. I'm not just pulling that out of a hat,

I have reviewed all of your google reviews.

I've reviewed all of the trip advisor and facebook and

all the other things that you can review as far

as the general public and there is, there are very,

very few negative comments and those that are negative are

nothing to do with the trustworthiness of the organization.

And so I have determined that the public does view

you as trustworthy.

In addition after going through guidestar charity Navigator, other rating

sites for nonprofits, it is obvious to me that you

are highly rated as an organization that people should be

giving to yourself regulate value diversity.

You're good with your money And so in order for

people to feel safe and comfortable donating to you, this

is something that needs to be solid and luckily these

three things are all working in tandem in our favor.

So now you know a little bit about why.

So let's talk about how, how are we going to

create a plan giving program?

Well, there's different types of giving and one of the

issues that we're going to run into is a small

organization is that we have limited time limited staff and

limited funds and the best way to combat this is

to keep it simple.

We can always have a very complex plan giving program

later on and the length of the life of the

organization. But to begin, I'm going to suggest keeping it

very simple and doing things that require the least amount

of effort with the most amount of reward.

And so my recommendation here is going to be two

have people mainly myself or Sarah, the vice president talked

to individuals about adding us as a beneficiary onto policies

that they already have, such as a retirement account of

life insurance policy.

Whereas we would so that we could be beneficiaries to

those upon their death.

And the reason that these things are what I'm going

to be suggesting first is because they're not going to

require a lot of outside, um, information from financial advisors

and tax advisers and all these other professionals that we

would usually have to employ in order to do this

correctly. This is something that's really mostly on the side

of the giver.

They have to go to their own lawyer or they

have to amend their own paperwork or their own accounts.

It's something they can do with one click.

It's something they can do with very limited information from

us. All they need is our tax ID and um,

the incorporated name of our organization and then they are

sort of on their way.

So this is the simplest way for us to be

able to raise funds through plant giving program.

And it will also allow us to be able to

track things very simply as well, which will allow us

to use less staff time.

There's a couple of things that we can do when

we take on this plan giving program that will allow

it to gain momentum and to do well and be

successful in the first couple of years.

The first of those would be creating a legacy society.

A legacy society is essentially a pure organization for people

who have chosen to be those who give at as

part of a plan giving program for an organization.

And the reason that a legacy society is important is

twofold. First, it acts as a marketing tool to the

general public.

It's something that we can post on our website.

It's something that allows us to do a little bit

of peer pressure, which studies have shown actually helps improve

engagement and solicit donations is for people to see their

peers giving.

And so that allows us to be able to publicly

say these with individuals who have chosen to give with

us long term who find us trustworthy and we want

you to join those ranks.

Secondly, creating a legacy society really allows those donors to

feel important.

And one of the reasons that people choose to give

is because they feel like they are part of the

organization, they want to be viewed as important.

They want the recognition a legacy society allows for that

and it can be done in many different levels.

It can just simply be in name only a legacy

society. It's something we post on the website and we

send a thank you note and that's it.

Or it can be something more engaged where we offer

programs or lectures or a banquet or a gala or

any other type of meet up with those individuals so

that it feels very special to them and they continue

to maintain that pledge to us with their planned giving.

So that's something we need to do first.

The other part of that initial phase that we need

to be taking on is targeted campaigns.

And by that, I am referring specifically to the individual

donor base that we already have.

The best thing we can do is start with what

we have, where we know we're successful and then move

forward. So what I would like to do is to

sit down and look at who has been giving with

us um, at any level for many years and call

those individuals and asked them if they ever thought about

a plan giving gift to us now, you might be

thinking to yourself, why do we need to be focusing

on that plan giving?

When we could be focusing on asking them for a

major gift right now.

And there's a couple of reasons if we choose to

go for major gifts were not really funding ourselves long

term and also we might sort of run them dry

for the short term and not really be able to

engage them as much what I like about this idea

of doing plan giving with these individuals is that we

can essentially create a long term relationship with them that

could snowball into other advantages for us and for them,

it really is a reciprocal relationship.

Also, once we've sort of gone through this level of

individual donors, I think you're going to be surprised to

notice that many of the individuals who have given to

us over the years, long term at low levels are

probably going to be the ones who choose to have

a plan giving program, uh, pledge with us and studies

show that that is the case, loyalty to the organization

is the number one indicator of why someone will engage

in this type of giving program.

So I want to keep that in mind so that

you don't necessarily think that only the large givers are

going to be the ones that engage with us.

It's actually the little guys too.

Then I'd like to talk about a general marketing program

for me, this incorporates that engaging programming you see on

the other side.

And what this means is the creation of pamphlets and

flyers and going out and giving talks to organizations in

and plugging our plan giving programs, but also creating engaging

programs on site.

One of which I would like to try is called

a Death cafe.

This is a phenomenon that has been happening around the

world to make death less scary and less of a

taboo topic to speak of.

And because our organization is obviously focused around death and

funerals and burials.

I think it's important that we take the stigma away

from death and dying and so we can engage in

these sort of round table conversations with people have refreshments,

very low cost, very little staff time, invite the public,

discuss anything and everything related to death and use it

as a space for us to also plug or planned

giving program as well.

Finally, stewardship.

So stewardship refers to relationship building, which I'm sure you

all are aware and it will be very important for

us to remember that just because someone has pledged a

gift to us does not mean that they cannot revoke

that gift at any time.

They can go in and change their policy or they

can go in and take us off.

So it's important for us to maintain those pledged gifts,

most of which are coming from those relationships, hopefully of

those individual donors that we've already activated.

So we want to activate those current relationships, maintain those

pledged gifts.

And then part of stewardship also is making connections with

people who maybe come to our programmes, but don't necessarily

give yet and maintaining those connections to a point where

they might turn into donors in the long term, this

is something that does happen and it's worth investing in

this even though it's not necessarily tangible um in terms

of success in the short term.

So what is success for us?

I want to do it a couple of ways tangible,

intangible in our long term goals tangible for us.

We can document relationships that were made.

We can know if we have grown the amount of

relationships we also can have actual visible numbers, how many

donors we've added, How many funds we've secured, How many

planned gifts have been pledged to us.

These are all tangible things that we can see over

time. Right?

Well then there's the intangible.

I think it's gonna be very important for us over

the next couple of years to not mark success just

tangibly. It's important for us to know that growing of

relationship is success.

And there's a number of categories you'll see here that

any one person we speak with could fall into.

Perhaps somebody immediately says yes.

They decided to commit to gifting with us.

That's fantastic.

They could also say no, they could be not interested

at all.

They could just not really know anything about playing giving.

And so they just say no.

And so those are people we need to keep on

the list and go back to, right.

They might be part of that maybe in the future

crowd. But also there might be people that say I

might like to later, but I don't have the funds

to do it right now.

And that's fine.

The important thing is to know that we're going to

maintain those relationships and watch them grow Our long-term goals.

This is my big goal, 30 secure gifts and three

years after our launch, I would like to see an

increase in our overall donor base and an increase in

the amount of giving.

And I really think that we can we can do

that with what we have together.

And that's my presentation.

Thank you all so much for listening to me.

I have my sources available for you, um, in printed

form if you'd like to see them and I'd be

delighted to answer any questions.

Thank you so much.

Gearing up for Planned Giving or HCC

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