PG Calc Blog

Keeping Up With the Times

Last month's Marketing Corner discussed the importance of imagery when marketing your program. A reader responded with the following comment: "Here’s one of the all-time great pictures of a face. It’s the eyes." “Steve McCurry’s iconic photograph of a young Afghan girl in a Pakistan refugee camp appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine’s June 1985 issue and became the most famous cover image in the magazine’s history, ” according to the National Geographic website.

How Do You Measure Your Marketing Program's Success?

There's nothing like receiving a very large and unexpected bequest to grab leadership's attention. Such was the case about seven years ago, when a small regional university finally decided to formalize its planned giving program. Up to that point, the marketing of its planned giving program was inconsistent and the attention it received from development was sporadic. The realized bequest was the catalyst to pay more attention to this planned giving thing.

ACGA 2016 Recap

PG Calc team left to right: Bill Laskin, Andrew Palmer, Genevieve Richardson, Larry Kerstein, Gary Pforzheimer, Mike Valoris, Edie Matulka, Ann McPherson, Jeff Lydenberg, Samantha Benson. Last week ten intrepid members of the PG Calc team from Cambridge, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Cincinnati swooped into St. Louis to attend the 32nd ACGA Conference put on by the American Council on Gift Annuities. There were over 500 people in attendance and while I’m pretty sure we didn’t meet everyone, we did catch up with hundreds of clients and prospective clients from all over the country. In fact, I had a nice conversation with an attendee from Jerusalem and had dinner at an awesome Peruvian restaurant so I think it’s fair to say it was a truly international event.

A Little Change Can Go a Long Way

I was using Planned Giving Manager recently to check values in a table of gift annuity deductions. To my surprise, my results differed markedly from the values in the table. Although I noticed that there was a small difference between the IRS discount rate I used (2.2%) and the one used in the table (1.8%), the difference in deductions was so great that I was worried that I had stumbled upon a bug. Not so. It turned out that the small difference in IRS discount rates was the whole story.