Regular Endowment Gifts: Inspiring Donors’ Habits

You and your team are certainly familiar with annual giving strategies to encourage donors to regularly support your operating budget. When it comes to endowment fundraising, though, many organizations tend to think about endowment campaigns as isolated events every few years, perhaps executed alongside a capital campaign.
 
As the fundraising environment gets tougher, especially in an election year, take a look at your approach to engaging donors in endowment giving on a regular basis, not just during the occasional campaign every few years. Indeed, national annual events like National Philanthropy Day and GivingTuesday create strong opportunities to engage your donors in endowment-focused conversations. 
 
The team at the Community Foundation is happy to offer ideas for ways to make regular, consistent giving to your endowment fund an attractive–and even habit-forming–practice among your donors. Whether a donor’s cadence of contributions is monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually, the consistency delivers many benefits. Of course, your endowment will grow, which is a huge benefit. But your organization also will benefit from the communications and engagement opportunities. Here’s how: 

• As individual donors’ contributions to your endowment fund grow over time, you’re able to show them how they’ve personally helped build that all-important nest egg to ensure that your organization’s mission stays strong. 
• Consider periodically letting individual donors know just how much they’ve contributed to your endowment fund over time, and translate that amount into the income you’re able to devote each year to improving lives. When a donor sees what a big difference this can make in perpetuity, they’ll be pleased and maybe even surprised.
• Showing these results during a donor’s lifetime is an excellent platform for a serious discussion about the donor leaving a significant bequest to your endowment. It’s much easier for a donor to envision the future impact of an endowment gift when they’ve witnessed present impact. 

 
Reach out anytime to the team at the Community Foundation. We’re happy to help you establish endowment-building strategies to ensure that your mission stays strong for generations. If your organization has not yet established an endowment fund at the Community Foundation, please reach out. There’s no better time than the present to begin paving the way for a bright future.
 
This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not intended as legal, accounting, or financial planning advice.