Message To Readers

Thank you for reading my blog! As more people visit and sign up for email updates, the more inspired I get to stick with it (and I have fun anyway). The posts on this site are a combination of planned giving related news, training and background pieces, and commentary on various planned giving issues. And, I promise never to over blog!

This effort is still a work in progress but my goals are coming together. I have trained, advised and coached easily over 200 fundraisers in planned giving over the years. Goal number one: get as many of my previous trainees to be linked in (thank you those who have already signed up!). Ultimately, I hope to somehow make this an ongoing training module and a way to stay connected to my planned giving friends. Goal number two: to those who don't know me personally, my approach to guiding people since law school has always been to share info and/or give it away free (within reasonable limits, of course). So take advantage of it, read the blog, submit questions.

Lastly, you will see that my articles are based on pretty broad experiences throughout the non-profit world. But, there is also an approach behind the musings. I learned it not in law school, but rather from several years of in-depth Talmud study (not intended of course to be applied for non-religious purposes but very useful for lawyers nevertheless).

I can still remember the phone call I received from my first legal opponent - a middle aged BMV driving couch potato lawyer. He had just read my brief and was somewhat stunned about what I wrote and he called to ask me something like "what the heck is this?" Well, he found out the answer when the judge told him to sit down and be quiet and proceeded to read directly from my brief (a sign I quickly learned that meant we win) and granted our client our motion for summary judgement. The secret I learned from my Talmudic training is pretty simple - keep digging, keep questioning, keep trying to understand how legal issues work, and understand the concepts behind the rules. I have been talking with the best attorneys in the planned giving area for years and I can confidently say that they all have this in common - they make sure to understand how particular laws and rules came into being and what the drafters were trying to accomplish; they understand the concepts behinds the laws. No good attorney memorizes rules - they understand the rules to the point where they can apply them.

So, after all of these years in planned giving, I am still trying to better understand why these gifts work the way they do. And, while you (the readers) don't necessarily need to become tax experts, the more you understand the various legal issues involved in planned giving, the more confident you will feel when speaking with donors, the more planned gifts you will be able to close. All of us, myself included, need to be able to tell a prospect that we have to check with others before answering a question. But, you may never get to that point if you avoid the conversation or can't confidently lead the direction of the conversation towards a potential planned gift.

So, there you have it. Please stick with this site - I promise to get better organized (I plan to compile relevant posts into a book on planned giving some day). And, forward posts around!