Tracking Gifts of Assets: What Gets Measured Gets Funded

By Kimberly Jetton

Planned giving programs often find themselves in a precarious position. When budgets tighten or staffing becomes strained, gift planning is frequently among the first areas considered for reduction. The irony is that many organizations make these decisions without fully understanding the program's impact because they have never measured it.

For many gift planning professionals, the program's future is tied to results the organization may not even be tracking. The challenge begins with how most organizations measure fundraising success. Revenue is recorded, reports are generated, and year-end totals are reviewed. Yet one critical question often goes unanswered:

Why did the donor give the gift the way they did?

Making that distinction matters... A lot!

A donor who gives $500 from a checking account and a donor who gives $5,000 directly from an IRA are often recorded in the same exact way. Both appear as contributions. Both increase annual revenue. Yet they tell very different stories.

One gift came from income. The other came from wealth.

Gift planning exists to help donors discover assets that can often support larger gifts than cash alone. When organizations fail to track those gift vehicles separately, they lose visibility into one of the most important indicators of donor behavior and program success.

We recently examined this issue with one of our clients. After a year of planned giving marketing and donor education, we requested a report identifying donors who had given through IRA Qualified Charitable Distributions, appreciated securities, or donor-advised funds. We then compared those gifts against the donors' historical giving patterns.

The results were remarkable.

In case after case, donors who shifted from cash gifts to non-cash gift vehicles increased their annual support substantially. Many doubled their giving. Some increased it several times over.

One donor had contributed approximately $400 annually for four consecutive years. After receiving information about Qualified Charitable Distributions, that same donor made a $4,000 gift directly from an IRA.

The donor's commitment to the mission had not changed. The source of the gift had.

That single example illustrates a reality many gift planning professionals encounter regularly. When donors learn about tax-efficient ways to give, they often discover that they can make a far greater impact than they previously believed possible.

Yet without proper tracking, stories like these disappear into general fundraising revenue. Leaders

hip sees the dollars but misses the reason behind the growth. That is where tracking becomes essential.

Throughout my career, one of my first priorities in a new fundraising role was conducting a historical audit. I wanted to establish a baseline. How many planned gifts had been received? What types of gifts were donors making? What was the average value? How many documented expectancies existed? How many donors were utilizing non-cash assets?

Those questions matter because improvement cannot be measured without a starting point. If you do not know where you began, it becomes difficult to demonstrate progress.

What I discovered was surprisingly consistent. Many organizations tracked only one metric: dollars received.

Revenue is important, but revenue alone rarely tells the whole story.

At Pleiades, we spend considerable time helping clients establish meaningful tracking procedures because the data often reveals trends that would otherwise remain hidden. Every organization that accepts bequests, retirement plan distributions, donor-advised fund grants, stock gifts, real estate, life insurance, charitable gift annuities, charitable trusts, or other non-cash assets should be tracking those gifts separately and consistently.

Organizations that fail to track gift vehicles miss critical information about donor behavior. They also make it much harder to secure future investment in their programs. When leadership sees only total revenue, it becomes difficult to identify which fundraising strategies are producing results and which donor education efforts are creating growth.

The success of gift planning becomes invisible.

By contrast, meaningful tracking creates a much clearer picture of donor intent and capacity.

Imagine presenting a report to your board showing that IRA gifts increased by 40 percent, stock gifts doubled, donor-advised fund giving reached a new record, and documented bequest expectancies grew by $3 million.

Those statistics tell an important story. They demonstrate that donor education is working. They show that marketing investments are producing measurable outcomes. They provide evidence that the gift planning program is generating returns far beyond its cost.

Statistics also help organizations identify trends, evaluate marketing efforts, understand donor preferences, and uncover future opportunities. They allow leaders to make strategic decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions.

Most importantly, they make the impact of your gift planning efforts visible. A well-tracked planned giving program becomes far easier to defend during budget discussions because leadership can see growth. Boards can see momentum. Donors can see stewardship.

What gets measured gets managed. What gets tracked gets funded.

If your organization is serious about building sustainable philanthropic revenue, tracking planned gifts and non-cash gifts is a strategic necessity. The organizations that embrace meaningful data collection gain a clearer understanding of their donors, uncover new growth opportunities, and build stronger cases for continued investment in gift planning.

The question is not whether your planned giving program is producing results.

The question is whether you are measuring those results well enough to prove that the effort is working.

We have created a helpful explanation of why this is important, as well as a template you can use to track how your donors are giving. Please email andy@pleiadesnpa.com for the explanation (.doc) and template (.xlsx).