Fiscal Year End is upon us, here's an easy way to keep track of your Charitable Giving

Donate on your agenda, not the Non-Profits… this simple downloadable form can help you keep track of your giving but also make sure that you don’t donate more than once. I think it’s sneaky how they keep sending envelopes and soliciting when you’ve already given for the year. Let us help you keep on top of things with Laurie’s easy suggestions…

I have a client (whom I adore) that I work with every couple of weeks. In her case I have the pleasure of sitting down, handwriting her checks while I pay the bills and then filing everything for her after we’ve gone over everything and she’s signed all of the checks. Bliss! I love working with her, she’s got a wonderful sense of humor and it is literally “old school” admin work and I really enjoy it!

After a while I got comfortable enough to ask why she agrees to donations when she gets solicitations on the phone. Her answer was one that I’ve heard from my clients a few times before: she gets confused as to who she’s donated to lately and thought it had been a year since she’d last written a check since times goes by so fast. This makes me grumpy. Not at my client but at the solicitors. They are planning on the fact that you aren’t paying attention and are therefore calling you repeatedly during the year (sometimes within the same month) and ask for more money. Not cool.

To help with the situation I was highlighting the checks that I wrote to the non-profits for her in the check register. I also started an Excel spreadsheet so that we could both keep track of what was being donated and when. Another bonus was that their Accountant thought I was a rock star, and that always feels good. My other equally important implementation was to ask her to never agree to any solicitation on the phone. Never. I told her that if she felt badly about it then to please go ahead and blame me, I can take it. We also set aside any solicitations into a “donations” file that she gets in the mail and pull them out every other session so that she can decide who and how much. I can also double check which she hasn’t already donated to and we can go from there.

Since she’s been following these procedures we’ve not only been able to keep better track of her donations but she’s been able to give a little more money to the charities that mean more to her rather than the ones she really didn’t care about but felt pressured on the phone.

Donating is up to you and it’s very personal. Please just be sure that you do it on your agenda, not theirs! What have you been doing to keep up with your charitable giving?