Welcome to the SoCalCGP Newsletter. The newsletter provides links to this page. Please see below for the items that appeared in the March 2024 issue.

• Distinguished Service Award Recipient Profile: Stephanie Becerra Buckley, JD, LLM, CAP
  
  
• Planned Giving Flash Update

• Quantifying the Value of a Planned Gift “Handraiser”

Distinguished Service Award Recipient Profile: Stephanie Becerra Buckley, JD, LLM, CAP

by Patience Boudreaux, MBA, CSPG, CFRE

A highlight of the Western Regional Planned Giving Conference is the opportunity for the Southern California Council to recognize the contributions of a member of our professional community who has generously contributed to the success and education of the planned giving community in our region. At the 33^rd Annual WRPGC (May 21-23, 2024), we will be celebrating Stephanie Buckley whose 25-year career in gift planning has spanned nearly every side of our profession from service provider to fundraiser to advisor. This month, we sat down with Stephanie to reflect on the highlights of her career and gain insight into what we can all learn from her path through gift planning.

Stephanie Becerra Buckley, JD, LLM, CAP

What brought you to the field of gift planning?

I was a law school classmate at UCLA with Elizabeth Bawden and Kristen Jaarda– we were all there at the same time but in different years. When I was in my third year, Elizabeth told me that Crescendo was looking to hire a tax attorney. I interviewed with Charles Schultz, and I left it thinking I had no idea what they did except I knew it involved working with charities and tax law. I ended up working there and it was probably one of the best decisions I ever made because, one, getting to learn from Charles Schultz was amazing, and to get that deep of an education was unparalleled. Two, I was thrown into teaching, and I was rightfully afraid of public speaking before then, plus answering the 1-800 number and having to answer those questions – there is no other way to get that type of training. It was just fortuitous that I went to law school with Elizabeth and Kristen and I decided to focus on tax law.

How did the transition to fundraiser happen?

At Crescendo, you end up answering every type of question over the years and I was there more than 6 years. We tended to hire law clerks from Pepperdine, and I was looking for an opportunity to work directly with donors. Pepperdine was a natural choice because I didn’t have to move and I knew they had a sophisticated planned giving program. I ended up spending more than 10 years there. I truly thought I’d never leave because the work felt so natural for me and I loved the people and the mission. But then I got the call from a recruiter.

And this prompted your move to your advisor career at Wells Fargo?

Yes, but at first, I was confused because he was describing the job that I thought Janice Burrill, who I knew and admired, did. He explained she had retired and so I agreed to meet the leaders on the team.  I just got a good feeling from them and about what they were trying to build. I never thought I’d leave Crescendo. I never thought I’d leave Pepperdine. But now I’ve been at Wells seven-and-a-half years. At Wells I started as the Philanthropic Specialist, which to me was very similar to fundraising, but rather than asking to support one particular charity, I was helping clients understand the various philanthropic vehicles and how they might help them achieve their goals.

Are there skills you naturally had or that you’ve developed that have served you well throughout your career?

I think a natural curiosity is very helpful. Also, the desire to help people and help inform them so they can help themselves. We talk about the tax deduction as an important part of philanthropy, and it’s important, but I find people just want to make the world a better place – people recognize they’ve been given much, and it may be luck plus skill, and they want to utilize their wealth for good. I try to get to know who they are and what they want to achieve – it’s better to listen more than talk. Maybe by doing this, you can help them have that “Aha!” moment of identifying the charity or cause that clicks with the experience they or their family have had that’s touched them. We are all here for a reason and have connection and having people share their story and values is important.

You’ve already mentioned several people who were influential in your career so far. I’m wondering if there were others who’ve played a role in other ways.

When I started, I didn’t look like the typical planned giving person but people in the field like Charles Schultz encouraged me. Women who were coming up at the time also encouraged and supported me, people like Claudia Sangster – I could always go to her with my questions, and she was generous with her time. Betsey Mangone and Janice Burrill were really awesome and paved the way for careers in this field. Kathryn Miree is retired now, but she’s still given generously to the field and is still my favorite speaker. I was looking for a book she had published on private foundations and couldn’t find the most recent edition. When I reached out to her, she sent me a copy from her own collection. A lot of the people in the council were so helpful in guiding how I have the conversations with donors and made me better.

What do you think you’ve gained from being active with SoCalCGP? (Thank you, by the way, for being so generous with your expertise over the years!)

Honestly, real connection and support from peers. It’s like the best group ever. If you want to get into fundraising, I tell people they need to join this group. Everyone is just so helpful. It doesn’t matter if a donor is looking at several organizations and, in theory, you are competitors. You can just call someone up and people just generally want to help you. You feel like you’re at home. Western Regional feels like Homecoming. I have genuine friendships from this group, which feels rare in this age of social media.

I agree. Is there any advice you have for someone in this field?

Reach out to others. If you don’t hear from them, reach out again! Don’t do this alone. People are willing to help you but we’re all busy so you may have to follow up and if they can’t help you, they may be able to connect you to others. If you’re struggling, ask for help because people will try to be there for you.

When you heard from us that you received the award, did you have any initial response?

I’m too young! Then I realized that when I started, there were few young people in this field, so since I entered fresh out of law school and am now a part of the “distinguished” group at 50, it’s about right. There’s no better educator than experience and I gained confidence that’s helped me to realize we don’t all want to play the same roles. I feel like this award is an acknowledgment that I’ve developed the skill to lead with grace and I wish I could tell my younger self to have more patience and grace as a leader earlier, but we do get there, and this award is an indication we’ve achieved this.

Leading with grace is pretty distinguished in my book. Thank you for all you’ve done for our professional community, Stephanie. I’d be remiss if I failed to ask about those at home who share you with us.

That would be my husband, Shawn, and fur babies. My husband and I do large breed dog rescue and have two right now. Sammie is an 11 (we think) year old, 120 lbs. English Mastiff. Smokey is a 10-year-old Great Dane mix.  We just got Smokey at the end of January but, he’s in his last stages. That is the hardest part with larger breed dogs. They just don’t live long enough.

Planned Giving Flash Update from PNC Institutional Asset Management

QCDs to Life Income Gifts and CGA Rates Increasing

At the board meeting on November 17, 2023, the American Council on Gift Annuities (ACGA) voted to increase its suggested payout rates for Charitable Gift Annuities (CGA) effective January 1, 2024. In this flash update, PNC Institutional Asset Management discusses updates for Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCD) to create CGAs and Charitable Remainder Trusts (CRT) and the positive implications of increasing CGA rates.

Click here to view the PDF

Quantifying the Value of a Planned Gift “Handraiser”

by Brantley Boyett, President and Co-Founder of Giving Docs

The return on investment for planned giving programs is notoriously hard to measure, since it often requires many years of relationship management to actually receive a planned gift. At Giving Docs, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to find better ways to measure the return on a nonprofit’s planned giving investment in real time. Over the past few years we’ve been particularly focused on a donor segment known as “handraisers”. 

Organizational definitions may vary, but we define “handraisers” as individuals who have openly signaled to an organization that they have interest in leaving a planned gift to that organization. They haven’t taken the steps to document this gift, or if they have, they haven’t notified the organization. (Over the last ten years, with a vast increase in survey marketing and online estate planning, we have seen a corresponding increase in what the industry knows as “handraisers.”)

Many planned giving directors and gift officers have difficulty justifying their annual budgets as compared to other initiatives that can immediately bring money in the door for the organization. If we can establish a better understanding of the financial implications of adding handraisers to the organizational pipeline, development professionals will be better equipped to articulate why this work is so important in budgeting discussions and beyond.

In an effort to quantify the value of handraisers, we partnered with Nathan Stelter from The Stelter Company to interview dozens of planned giving professionals. We also consulted our behavioral science team at the Duke University Center for Advanced Hindsight. This feedback from professionals and mathematical analysis from scientists led us to a model that helps generate a clear value that handraisers bring to organizations not just in the future– but right now.

The result: our “Value of a Handraiser” calculator.

Essentially, the calculator is a mathematical framework that allows an organization to assign a monetary value to handraisers. We feel strongly that this calculator should be in the public domain, so we have posted the calculator on our website for anyone to use for free.

This calculator remains a work in progress, and it is intended to invite collaboration from colleagues across our industry. We hope to continue to receive input and for users to question our assumptions and bring their expertise to the table to help us make it better.

Please reach out to me directly at [email protected] if you would like to chat about this calculator or would like to contribute to its ongoing evolution.

Our research has made it clear that many organizations are very good at tracking handraisers and understanding their general conversion rates, but that handraisers are generally not assigned a monetary value by organizations. Our hope is that by better understanding these conversion rates and applying mathematical principles to the data that we do have, we can begin to help organizations see these large lists of handraisers as a foreseeable pipeline of “Gifts Under Management,” or long-term revenue for the organization.

Please take a moment to check out the Value of Handraiser calculator, and we look forward to your thoughts, comments, and ideas to make this tool as helpful as possible to the entire planned giving community.