It’s well-known among planned giving professionals that the free-to-use Planned Giving Design Center (PGDC) is a first-stop resource to learn about charitable giving legislation and education.  Recent news about the 2010 Tax Act is important and I urge you to enroll as a user to read a new paper on the ramifications that could become [...]

April in Colorado (where I live) is a magical time.  Winter’s snow has ended, trees are budding, daffodils and tulips are blooming.  I can’t think of anything else but “Spring Cleaning, “and I’ve been itching to get it done.  It’s time to “freshen up” my house, which means:  cleaning out the closets of ill-fitting clothes, [...]

I recently came across an Australian organization’s web pages highlighting a high tea function held to honor long-term supporters and to induct newly announced bequest givers into their friends program.   The organization’s mission is animal welfare and they hosted their tea at the nearby botanical garden.  More than 250 people attended!  That’s not it though.  [...]

A few years ago, USNews.com called the prospect research, “the best-kept-secret” – one of nonprofit’s “hidden heroes.”   Well, I didn’t need a national news source to tell me that!   I first happened upon prospect research as a way to better identify and understand organizational prospects around 1997 or so.  While directing the planned and major [...]

Note from ProspectResearch.com: Katherine Swank’s below post was featured on Phyllis Freedman’s The Planned Giving Blogger. We invite you to visit her blog for best practices and ideas on planned giving and prospect research. Either as parents or children, most of us are familiar with the story of Goldilocks who ventures into the woods and [...]

I was traveling to Philadelphia by plane this week and through sheer luck was seated next to a vice president of a hotel management company.  Turns out he is also the incoming Chair of the Board of my local American Red Cross chapter, as well as a volunteer with a recently formed local micro-granting organization.  [...]

Over the past ten work days Phyllis Freedman, an independent fundraising consultant specializing in planned giving marketing, has been sharing her ten commandments for at The Planned Giving Blogger. They’re wonderful and we should all have them pinned up on our corkboards or written on our whiteboards or as the home screen of our smart-devices, [...]

Last week, I spoke at the monthly meeting of the San Antonio chapter of Partners for Philanthropic Planning.  The topic:  Prospect Research for Planned Gifts.  I’ve recently written a white paper on the subject in conjunction with my colleague Michael Quevli, and along with one of Target Analytics’ founders, Lawrence Henze, have presented the paper [...]

In a March 2011 cover article, Time Magazine explored the collection and sale of personal data in the United States.  My colleague, Lawrence Henze and I saw an immediate opportunity to build on this information and to explain many of the data sources available to nonprofit institutions for their development programs.  We were honored when [...]

I just read a post by one of the popular planned gift calculation product companies regarding common questions that they receive during planned giving program audits with their nonprofit clients.  The focal area called “Metrics and Productivity” is often a center-of-attention topic, they say, and the tug between raising deferred revenue and the need to [...]