How to Track Planned Giving

NOTE: This is solely a recommendation of how you can handle your planned/legacy giving in Eleo.

1. Create a Contact Group to identify legacy donors. You can call it whatever you like: Planned Giver, Legacy Donor, Bequestor, etc. If you need help with creating this checkbox, please reference the ‘Contact Groups’ document under the Guides tab in the Library.

You can then add contacts to that Contact Group by checking the box in the contact record of anyone that you need to. Please ensure that you click on ‘Save’!

2. Use the Documents tab to upload important materials like signed agreements related to the legacy gift.

For example:

3. Record the date the donor signed the agreement committing to leave a charitable contribution to the nonprofit when they pass away. This can be documented in the Comment box, typed in the Notes area of the History tab, or entered into a custom field. If you need assistance with creating the custom field, please review the documents in the Guides tab of the Library that are titled ‘An Overview of Custom Fields’ or ‘How to Add a Date Custom Field’.

Image of ‘Comment’ box and custom field example:

Example of History tab:

4. If you know the estimated value of the planned gift, you may want to make a custom text or numeric field for that as well. If you do not know this information yet, then you can leave that blank or omit this step.

5. Create a drop-down list custom field to identify the type of financial vehicle used for the legacy gift. This can be a drop-down list on the Contact record. If you need guidance with creating the custom field, please visit our documents in the Guides tab of the Library on ‘An Overview of Custom Fields’ or ‘How to Add a Dropdown Custom Field’.

6. When the planned gift reaches maturity (its end date), you will record the gift. We recommend using the Gift Source field to identify where this gift came from. This is customizable under Settings > Lookup tables > Gift Sources.

7. Reporting on Planned Giving.

A. You can filter on the Contact Group that you created to see all of those donors (Ex. Planned Giver/Legacy Donor/Bequestor). This is across the board in any Contact, Donor, or Gift Reports.

B. You can run our Gift Reports to see which of those planned gifts were realized using the Gift Source field.

C. To report on any of the custom information mentioned above, you can create a custom report using the Contact Report Writer. This will allow you to pull the information in the custom fields. You can also filter on those fields if needed.

D. If you would like to see both contact and gift information, please use the Gift Report Writer instead of the contact one. To learn about these reports, our document in The Guides tab of the Library that’s titled ‘How to Create a Custom Report’ will be useful for you.