At the Starting Line

You are at the starting line.  Your boss and perhaps her boss have decided your United Way needs an endowment and a planned giving program.  Now they have handed you a new title, reams of recommendations, and a goal of starting it all successfully.  Never fear, you are really in a pretty good place.  Lots of us in the UW planned giving world have already made the mistakes and benefitted from the lessons learned from experience and the teachings of others who have figured out how to start and where to go.

Recently I was re-reading a Kathryn Miree article and her emphasis on the importance of beginning with that essential and eternal endowment question, "Why are we doing this?"  The answer is called your Case Statement and Kathryn points out the need for both external and internal statements.  The internal statement communicates the need to your staff, how an endowment and planned giving program will fit into your resource development efforts, and how the gifts and expectancies will be counted and accounted.  The external statement communicates with your donors the reason they should give to the endowment.  A good external statement should:

• Inspire vision
• Inspire passion
• Be urgent
• Involve the Donor
• Be brief enough to be useful.

We didn't have an internal case statement when our programs were first started in 1991, however I did pull the "Case for Support" as a reminder of our purpose.  It reads

United Way should raise a signficant endowment for the purpose of launching major community initiatives aimed at specific problems in the community.  This would enable UW to select issues, commit to single or multi year funding and attract other partners from the community to collaborate to create real and lasting change.
 

You will also find a good Case for Endowment on the website of  St. Matthew's Parish School in Pacific Pallisades, CA. 

The best way I have found to build your case is to gather a small group of volunteers and ask the questions, "Why should we have an endowment?" and "Why should you give to the endowment?"  With a good external case statement in hand, bring together a diverse group of staff and ask the same questions to develop your internal statement.  Remember, these can change with time, knowledge, and program development.

The last bit of advice I am going to share today comes from the experience of others.  Endowments should not be started to pay the administrative costs of your United Way.  I could write pages on why this is just not a good idea.  Contact me and I will give you several LUW's who made that choice and have found that it is a difficult mistake to correct when you've learned your lesson.

I plan to add several more resources over the next few posts that will help you at the starting line of your endowment and planned giving programs.