How Professional Advisory Committees Can Be Most Effective
Summary
In today's challenging fundraising environment many community foundations and other nonprofit organizations strive to work with attorneys, accountants, and wealth advisors with the hope they will refer their clients to their organizations. In this article, planned giving consultant Ken Nopar offers his advice on how Professional Advisory Committees ("PACs") can help accomplish this goal.
By Ken Nopar
In today’s challenging fundraising environment, many community foundations and other nonprofit organizations strive to work with attorneys, wealth advisors, and accountants with the hope that they will refer their clients to their organizations. Professional Advisory Committees (“PACs”) have been established to accomplish this goal, and others contemplate whether they should create PACs or similar networks of advisors in their areas.
Some PACs are quite active and have resulted in many new donor relationships, some are quite dormant, while others generate some donor activity but could easily create more and be reinvigorated with renewed attention and effort.
PACs are most helpful for organizations that have missions in which they advocate all charitable giving (e.g., community foundations) or in which a good percentage of the general population or a specific population can support their missions (e.g., hospitals or jewish federations). They are not as effective for those that have a very specific focus in one particular giving area.
Though increasingly, more attorneys, accountants and wealth advisors are discussing charitable planning with their clients, most are reluctant and unlikely to recommend giving to a particular organization unless they have confidence in that organization and there is little risk in making a referral. The advisor must also know that a client is interested in the cause or that an organization can help a client achieve her or his charitable goals. Professional Advisory Committees can be helpful in encouraging advisors to proactively talk about charitable giving because they are aware of a solution that is beneficial to their clients (and often to advisors as well).
Following are some of the steps that need to be met in order for a nonprofit organization to have an effective Professional Advisory Committee:
- The PAC and the organization must have a mutually beneficial relationship. A PAC will achieve only modest success if an organization just expects its PAC members to refer their clients.
- PAC members need to be engaged on an ongoing basis and know what is expected of them. (One PAC member of a community foundation client of mine recently told me that she would be glad to help but had never been given any “marching orders.”)
- Organizations need to understand how PAC members would like to benefit from being members and what they are looking for in meetings, events, and communications.
- Organizations need to be able to demonstrate how they can be a resource to the PAC members and their clients.
- Existing and prospective PAC members should be interviewed by an outside and objective source who can solicit candid and constructive feedback that can help to create a more successful PAC. Survey Monkey questionnaires do not usually generate substantive and helpful responses, do not allow for follow up and probing, and are completed only by those already happy and active PAC members.
- Organizations need to ask themselves:
- How many PAC members are there who have not been active and can they be re-engaged?
- How many non-PAC attorneys, accountants, and wealth advisors are there in their communities, whom have never been called upon?
- Is the organization itself able to objectively determine whether it is doing everything possible and is not missing numerous opportunities to engage area advisors?
When nonprofit organizations follow these and other steps, Professional Advisory Committees can be extremely effective in helping to increase the awareness of the organizations among advisors and subsequently prospective donors in their communities. Organizations with PACs should assess whether there is more that they can do for PAC members and other advisors in their communities. Finally, is there more that they can ask of their PAC members, and do the PAC members understand what they are supposed to do on behalf of the organization?
Ken Nopar is the Principal of Nopar Consulting, a Chicago-based firm that advises community foundations and other organizations around the country that seek to work with and engage wealth advisors and attorneys in their communities. The firm also trains wealth management firms and banks how to have the charitable planning conversation with their clients and how the firms and clients both benefit from this discussion. Ken can be reached at ken.nopar@gmail.com. The firm’s website is www.noparconsulting.com.
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