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“Animation is like telling a joke and waiting three years to see if anyone laughs.” – Ed Catmull, Pixar Studios

I heard Ed Catmull share this in an interview about the making of Toy Story. His point was that working on the film required a great vision, patience, and the confidence to know that what they were working on was right without the immediate feedback.

I was as shocked as anyone at the death of Prince, and deeply saddened at the news that he may have died without a will. The fact that his estate will now become part of the public record – and that any potential fight over it will be national news – is causing many people, not just in the nonprofit world, to have conversations about estate planning and protecting the assets they’ve built over the years.

Thank you for asking, but we’ve already made an endowment commitment to your organization.

If you’re visiting with your best endowment prospects, invitations to become members of your legacy society quite often produce this response. And it is gratifying to hear! The challenge is to identify your best endowment prospects – your organization’s “best friends.”

Our board just isn’t a fundraising board.

We hear that feedback from nonprofit leaders – both staff and volunteer – nearly every day. Whether it’s said with regret or with frustration, nonprofits, schools and churches are clearly puzzled as to why their board seems disengaged or focused on less-important minutiae.

Many thanks for the good wishes. My situation has deteriorated dramatically, and I’m currently in home hospice. For now all is stable. But the long-term prospects are clear and not good. And long-term for me is actually very short-term.

Conversations around giving can feel tricky for anyone, but I find that the people who struggle with it most are church leaders. Many pastors and lay staff are reluctant to talk about money at all. Those that do tend to focus on immediate operational needs of the church or mission-based outreach.

Many nonprofit leaders want to begin an endowment development program, but are unsure of where to start. They don’t know who might be a good prospect in their community or among their past donors. How can you tell if someone has the resources and the desire to leave a legacy gift to your organization?

Upon learning about an amazing $40,000,000 estate gift made to the Westport Weston Family YMCA in Connecticut, another non-profit leader commented to me on how lucky they were to receive such a transformational donation. Having had the honor of working with the staff and volunteers of the Westport Weston Family Y for the past few years on their capital campaign, I quickly assured him that “luck” had nothing to do with it!

Recently, we were asked to share a presentation on endowment for NAYDO – the North American YMCA Development Organization. We published this blog on their site as a companion to that presentation, and are sharing it here with our readers. Even if you’re not a YMCA, we think you might benefit from dispelling a few of these myths in your nonprofit, school or church.

Recently I had lunch with a church pastor. His church has an endowment fund from the sale of property, but it hasn’t grown much since then. Like many congregations, his church could benefit from the income a stronger endowment could provide.