Gift Hub

Winners and Losers in Collaborartive Gift Planning for Highest Capacity Donors

Over the last few weeks I have had a chance to serve on panels or give talks to advisors and gift planners at the National Partnership for Philanthropic Planning, Advancement Network (Community Foundations), The Carter Center, and by webinar with Advisors in Philanthropy. The topic is always some version of how gift planners and financial advisors can better collaborate to serve the high capacity people that some of us call donors and some call clients.  Collectively, we need at least four distinct skill sets, plus a humble recognition of our own limited capacities, and a willingness to work with others across disciplinary boundaries. (And we need to overcome what holds us back.)

1) Skill set 1: the ability to listen for the hopes, dreams and aspirations of our fellow citizens who have so much. Not just needs and wants. Not just hearing and serving the grudging, disgruntled "bad angel," so often inflamed by the radio or the news, but the better angels that pass through us, as through walls, in pursuit of a soul worth saving, or a world.  

2) Skill sets 2: technical ability in a speciality area, relevant to the work. Such areas include estate and financial planning, legal work, investment planning, business exit planning. Also included might be strategic philanthropic consulting, family dynamics consulting, family governance work, or the negotiation of gift agreements.

3) Skill set 3: ability to keep a process moving and take responsibility for an outcome, inclusive of many stakeholders.

What holds us back? Each discipline is like a creature in an ecosystem. Each discipline has evolved to forage, feed itself, fend off competitors and reproduce its own systems. This is what it means to be well trained, well educated, and disciplined. Yet, the cross-disciplinary work above asks the dog to climb trees, the cat to swim, and butterflies to pull a wagon.  The creatures are not built or incentivized or disciplined or managed to work in this fluid way towards a result which is good for client family, good for the community, and which may or may not pay as well as business as usual - and is much more difficult and requires much more education and does not apply to that many clients.

What is coming next? Study after study shows the wealthy givers are not happy with our respective performances, taken on average. They expect us to work better towards their ideal outcomes. Specifically, what is coming next is a shift from creating "endowed funds" at nonprofits, to creating outsourced endowments held by advisors in various tools, like foundation or donor advised fund or even CRT and CLT. The driving force for field change is the convergence of assets under managememt, and the donor's desire to use gift agreement and staged payments to hold charities accountable for getting agreed upon results. Dr. Steven Meyers of The American Committee of Weizmann Institute is in the forefront of this with a new book about to be published, on Personalized Philanthropy. Certain advisors are listening intently.  Tim Belber, with a new book coming out on values-based legacy planning is in the forefront. John A. Warnick is lending a forum to discuss all this. Advisors from Todd Fithian's Legacy network, including Tim, but several more, are following these developments.

Who loses? For once, the ones who lose are the ones who should lose. If you are a charity that takes endowment money and treats gift agreements as lover's lies, promises made to be finessed, you will lose. If you are a fundraiser who hits and runs with solicitation, rather creating a reasoned gift plan, you will lose. If you are a fundraiser who distrusts advisors and refuses to collaborate, preferring to work around them, you will lose. If you are a supervisor of fundraisers who insists on current dollars, and booking the principal to your endowment, rather than allowing for outsourced endowments when appropriate, you will lose. If you are an institution whose prefers to treat fundraising as a gimme gimme function, run like a boileroom, or with road warriors using a one or two call "ask," you will lose, even if your organization has billions in your endowment, and very wealthy, very loyal (reasonably patient) donors. You will lose because what you do is not the best that can be done for those you serve, or solicit. And so far you don't seem to care. And it shows.  

The winners? Dare I say it? The winners are advisors who manage assets, lawyers who create foundations and other outsourced endowment tools, and advisors and others who can appropriately negotiate and shop outsourced endowment gift agreements. Community foundations and national donor advised fund complexes are well-positioned, as outsourced endowment holders and accepters of hard to value non-cash assets. Insurance sales may also arise to replace gifted assets or to complete the gift at the end of life. Also those winning are those nonprofit gift planners, like Steven Meyers, who see themselves as working for a match between donor mission and their organization's capacities, and who seek the best possible outcome, on behalf of that shared mission, regardless of who holds the money. Also winning are those supervisors who are able to take the long view and support gift planners who operate at this level and in this spirit.

The market in gift planning is so obscure, so opaque, so small, and so thin, that it does not clear in anything like a rational fashion. We are overdue for a correction. I believe we are about to see a more client-friendly approach that will result in our better angels being better served for the benefit of our communities.

Prayer Vigils for the Walton Family

A number of those reading Gifthub (secretly) are advisors to some of the world's wealthiest families. They read for years and say, "I have no idea what you are talking about." I ask you, those who identify as Consiglieres, Trusted Advisors, or Secular Priests, to dynastic wealth to imagine that you were with Alice Walton, or another of your best clients,  showing her how her family could own and control as much money as the bottom 42%, as today but more and more than that, as time goes by, if they follow your suggestions and pay you well. At about the point you have assured the client of a Dynasty to Flourish for 100 Years, you hear noise on the street and peek through the blinds to see priests, rabbis, nuns, academics, and Wal-Mart workers holding a prayer vigil, holding up signs, "All religions believe in Justice," or "The Waltons are robbing America." This is not a private nightmare: It is happening in real time.   Mr. or Ms Fixit:

What would you counsel your client?

Would you call the police?

Would you invite the demonstrators inside?

I have a friend, well-educated, who takes learning lightly, who lives simply, and speaks with plain truth, tempered with tact. This friend advises families with net worth on up into the billions. I asked this friend, over a cheeseburger and a beer in an aiport lounge, the questions above. The answer my friend gave: "I would invite the demonstators in. They might find they have more in common with the heirs than they might think. The heirs of dynastic families may not be making the decisions. The money may be held for them in tools they do not control. They too may feel that the world is out of joint. And they might welcome a conversation."

Not all families have a heart for the poor, not all middle class families, not all rich families, not all broke families. But to the staff and board (on which I serve) of Interfaith Worker Justice, I would say, and have said, it takes more courage to talk with billionaires and their advisors in the faith that they and we are human clay, than it takes to go to jail. We who have less would rather be beaten with a truncheon, than enter into a moral dialogue with those we see as "oppressors." Our protest without conversation confirms the very thing we hope to change: the polarization of wealth and the impossiblity of our being "one nation under God."

Interfaith Worker Justice (organizing these protests) is the org to which I give most, because they live the faith that all God's children matter - and matter without regard to wealth or power.  If you believe that IWJ is opening an important dialogue about the proper uses of wealth in a putative democracy, consider a gift to them. (To IWJ a major gift starts at $500.) If you believe that we can do better than confrontation, street theater, symbolic arrests, and the hardening of the human heart, consider making a gift, and sending with it an offer to talk. If you represent tremendous wealth and believe in the commonweal, commonwealth, or shared destiny of our republic, please do not just gawk. (If you call yourself a Secular Priest to Flourishing Families, or aspire to such role, please consider joining the real priests and Drs of Divinity in a holding cell. You might learn some good interfaith moves and improve your singing voice as well.)

Bakhtin, the great literary critic, writing under Stalin, writing of Carnival, if only to avoid writing transparently of current events, said it was "a play without footlights." We are all,  even the bystanders, written into this play, The Human Comedy, by An Omniscient Author Function, one with a wry sense of humor.  With Rabelais, may we say, "Come let us eat, drink, and be merry." I would like to meet all my friends around that table, particularly if the rich or their most trusted advisors will bring the wine. $5 a quart plonk is all IWJ ever serves, and the crappiest cheese and crackers. My friends, we can do better together.

False Art

False Art wears finery, and walks with little mincing steps, every inch a lady. Sadly, she sometimes tries to sing.

Phronesis and The Philanthropic Plural

Phronesis, in Aristotle, is practical wisdom, or judgment. The following question drill (suited, it seems to me, for dialectic, dialogic, self-aware, philanthropy) comes from the sociologist, now at Said School of Business, Bent Flyvbjerg, via Wright and Cairns, Scenario Thinking:

1. What is going on here?

2. Is it desirable?

3. What, if anything should we do about it?

4. Who gains and who loses, by what instrumentalities of power?

Take the incursion of metrics, managed systems, branding, mass customization, into all walks of life, the rise of wealth inequality, the instrumentaliziation of employees, donors, customers. Take climate change. Take money in politics. Take any issue where human systems, natural systems, wealth, power, ethics, and justice intersect. Then do the 4 question drill. It is humbling, even shaming.

Compare those questions to those asked by H. Peter Karoff, in The World We Want, of the world historical, philanthropic "hyperagents" (as Paul Schervish calls them). Notice how the word "we" works in both the drill above and the one below.

1. What is the world we want?

2. What conditions are needed to realize it?

3. What are the obstacles?

4. And what strategies, plans, and tactics can make it so?

The first drill, by nakedly, in the final question, foregrounding power and its instrumentalities, problematizes the "we" who make decisions in accordance with what "we" want and "the world 'we' want." The second drill will go over better with many well-placed philanthropists, precisely because the "we" used unquestioningly is the royal plural, or as Peter (a mentor and good friend acknowledged to me), "the philanthropic 'we.'" So rock on the instrumentalities of power....

Yes, I am bitter about it. Preaching Giving and Grace, and the economy of Love and Gratitude, at the intersection of Wealth and Bondage, as my generous Patron and esteemed Mistress's least trusted serving professional, as a Fool among Knaves, living in a Dumpster, naked in all weather, hungry, miserable, without prospects for anything better, and with worse coming, in the way of a beating, and if that does not work, another lobotomy, what the hell do you expect from me? Not that I am complaining; the world we want could certainly be worse, and soon will be, if anyone were to listen to me. Fortunately, they won't. Progress will continue apace, once the higher ups tell us why, how, when, with whom,  and how often, how measured, and with what impact. Until then, let's pass the bottle of bum wine, while supplies last. Community, friend, is where you find it. Don't hog it all. It's my last bottle, after all. I bummed the money for it. I get to say who drinks it. My Dumpster, my rules. Give it here, before it's gone. 

Best Practices of a world class Fool

World class Fools, too, as you would expect, have an annual conference and panels and breakout groups. Admist the din of Bedlam, today's topic is, "What have we learned that has served us best?" How to take a beating is apparently the answer.

The Wise Courtiers' Best Practices

The Courtiers, too, have a Mastermind Group, where they go to learn Best Practices from each other. How can we best serve the King, whose name is Lear, is today's question. The Fool, dancing through, carrying an empty pitcher and a  tray of invisible beer mugs, offers, "Is this before or after you have driven him mad?"