Your Endowment: Helpful Language to Engage Donors

Your donors are likely very familiar with the term “endowment,” but they might not know how it works or how important it is to help sustain your mission for the long term. If you’ve established your organization’s endowment fund at the Community Foundation, we’re happy to help you communicate the benefits of endowment gifts to interested donors who may be new to providing this type of support.
 
For example, you can include language in your communications along these lines: 
 
“Endowment” is the word often used to refer to a designated pool of assets that are invested by and tracked separately such that a modest portion (usually based on a percentage) of the assets are distributed each year for charitable purposes, and the rest of the assets remain invested to grow in perpetuity. This growth, in turn, helps the endowment provide even more support each year to our organization.
 
And this: 
 
Our organization has established its endowment fund at the Community Foundation, where the team is experienced at managing the accounting, investment, and distribution aspects of endowment funds. Working alongside the Community Foundation, our board and staff are committed to keeping a finger on the pulse of our community’s greatest needs and maintaining a deep understanding of how our organization can meet those needs now and well into the future when priorities emerge that simply could not have been predicted. Distributions from our endowment fund are reviewed and approved by an independent board of directors to ensure that they fulfill our organization’s mission-focused goals for establishing the endowment in the first place.
 
And this:
 
When you support our endowment fund through gifts of stock, bequests in your will, beneficiary designations on your retirement plans, or even gifts of real estate and other complex assets, you are helping pave the way for our organization’s long-term stability to continue to improve the quality of life in our region. What’s more, we can work with you and your advisors to structure endowment gifts that meet your own estate planning and tax objectives.
 
As always, please reach out to the team at the Community Foundation for ideas about growing your endowment. We are here for our community, and we are here for you! 
 
This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not intended as legal, accounting, or financial planning advice.