Personalized Philanthropy and the Four Donors: Parables for Radically Rethinking Your Philanthropy

Note: This series on personalized philanthropy from the donor’s perspective has previously been posted only as individual articles. For convenience, the full series is available here as a PDF, as well as through the PGDC website. slm

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION –

We are pleased to introduce this series of six articles as a companion to the book by Steven L Meyers, Personalized Philanthropy: Crash the Fundraising Matrix and Make the Real Shift to Donor-Focused Giving. While that book was written primarily for gift officers and professional advisors, these articles are written for advisors to share with donors – hopefully to begin a new conversation about philanthropy with clients/donors who ardently wish to support their most treasured charities. The articles aim to introduce some of the basic concepts of Personalized Philanthropy, a powerful new and tested model for charitable planning which challenges conventional fundraising practices in bridging current and future giving so that donor impact and recognition may begin immediately and scale up over time.

For donors, there is special access to new insights in charitable giving. Enlightened gift officers and their organization's most committed supporters are beginning to explore these techniques together, and with some very good outcomes.

For professional advisors, at first blush, Personalized Philanthropy presents a dilemma: it offers a solution to a problem that many of us don’t know we have.

The "killer apps" and "umbrella" gift designs described enable donors to enjoy immediate recognition and impact of their philanthropy -- benefits largely deferred or denied in our traditional financial and estate techniques, simply because the trusts and other vehicles that power them, with some exceptions, are not effective philanthropically until the death of the client.

It often happens that because we don't see the potential opportunity of gifts with immediate impact and recognition, we can't even begin to talk about them. Maybe we will now.