Maybe Your Most Important Fundraising Tool is Not a CRM – It’s Your Gift Acceptance Policy
Your gift acceptance policy is more than a formality. In some ways, your gift acceptance policy is like the steering wheel in your car: you use it to steer toward the best gifts and away from costly potholes. Of course, your steering wheel is equipped with an air bag that might save your life, and a well-crafted policy can quite literally save your organization’s life too. However, the steering wheel analogy goes only so far. Unfortunately, gift acceptance policies are optional, not standard equipment like a steering wheel. And, in contrast to a steering wheel, you’ve got to build your gift acceptance policies yourself.
Alternative Endings: Early Terminations of Split Interest Gifts
With most split interest charitable gifts, if all parties agree, the arrangement can be terminated at any point in time. In many cases, the person giving up the benefit will be entitled to an additional charitable tax deduction. In this webinar, Jeffrey Frye and Amy Brown from our Client Services team will review situations where a life income beneficiary or a life tenant may want to terminate their interest. They will discuss the steps involved in terminating a split interest gift, as well as how to compute the value of the benefit that is being relinquished and the potential for a tax deduction.
Quick Tip: Customize PGM Anywhere with your Charity’s Logo
From the Blog: Don’t Run FASB Liability Calculations for Lead Trusts and Perpetual Charitable Trusts
IRS Announces Indexed Tax Items for 2026: Adjustment Is 2.3%
Valuation Rate for New PIFs Will Remain 4.0% in 2026
Navigating Year-End Deadlines with Your Donors
Monthly Webinar and Software Training Schedules for 2026
CGA Manual Updated
It Was Great to See So Many of You at CGP!
Quick Tip: Customize PGM Anywhere with your Charity’s Logo
PGM Anywhere can include an image, such as your charity’s logo, in the upper lefthand corner of every presentation. Your primary administrator can also add the same image (or a different image) to customize your diagrams.
The charity image must conform to size requirements to upload to PGM Anywhere successfully. Images used in headings in PGM Anywhere should be no more than 0.75 inches high and 3 inches wide. The closer the custom image is to this dimension, the better it will look when inserted into presentation headings.
Presentation headings should have an aspect ratio of up to 1:4. If an image is wider than that, it will be resized to fit the heading area width and may appear squat and compressed. If an image is much taller than wide, it will appear very thin when resized to fit in the header area.
All images must be in .jpeg, .gif, or .png format, and the file name must not have any spaces in it.
Once you have your logo correctly formatted, it is easy to add to the Customize section of PGM Anywhere.
Choose Customize.
Choose Organizations.
Tap the Edit icon next to the name of the organization for which you want to upload one or more images.
Scroll down and tap the Plus icon next to “Charity image for headings.” A standard browse dialog will open.
Browse to the image file you want to upload, highlight it, then tap Open. The uploaded image will appear in the image picker below “Charity image for headings.”
Click Save.
Contact Client Services at support@pgcalc.com or at 888-474-2252 if you have any questions or need help.
From the Blog: Don’t Run FASB Liability Calculations for Lead Trusts and Perpetual Charitable Trusts
PG Calc provides software for calculating the estimated Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) liabilities for life income gifts. We also offer a service whereby we will run the calculations for the charity. These estimates of future payment obligations make sense for life income gift arrangements – charitable gift annuities (CGAs), charitable remainder trusts (CRTs), and pooled income funds (PIFs). For each of these gift vehicles, the charity has an obligation to make payments either for a number of years or for a person’s remaining lifetime. However, we also see charities that record future payments from lead trusts and perpetual trusts as obligations of the charity. Does this make sense? Let’s explore this question.
IRS Announces Indexed Tax Items for 2026: Adjustment Is 2.3%
The IRS has announced the values for 2026 of various tax items that are indexed annually for inflation. Values have been adjusted upward about 2.3% from their 2025 levels. Of particular interest to gift planners, the 2026 annual limit on qualified charitable distributions (QCDs) that fund outright gifts will be $111,000 (a $3,000 increase). The limit on one-time QCDs to fund a gift annuity or charitable remainder trust will be $55,000 (a $1,000 increase). See IRS Notice 2025-67.
Also, the federal unified gift and estate tax exemption amount in 2026 will be $15,000,000 ($30,000,000 per couple), an increase from $13,990,000 ($27,980,000 per couple) this year. This increase was mandated in the 2025 Tax Act that passed in July. The amount will be adjusted for inflation starting in 2027.
The federal standard deduction will increase next year to $31,500 for married couples filing jointly and to $15,750 for single filers, an increase of $1,500 and $750, respectively. The federal annual gift tax exclusion will not change: it will remain $19,000 per person ($38,000 per couple) in 2026.
See Revenue Procedure 2025-32 for the details on all indexed federal tax items in 2026, including all federal income tax schedules for 2026. The most relevant tables are posted in the PG Calc Knowledge Base:
Valuation Rate for New PIFs Will Remain 4.0% in 2026
Pooled income fund (PIF) deductions are computed using a valuation rate rather than the monthly IRS discount rate. The applicable valuation rate depends on the age and investment history of the fund.
The mandated valuation rate for gifts to funds less than three taxable years old has been 4.0% in 2025. It will remain 4.0% in 2026. This rate equals the highest annual average monthly IRS discount rate over the prior three years, rounded to the nearest 0.2% and reduced by 1.0%.
The valuation rate for gifts to funds more than three taxable years old is the fund’s highest annual rate of return in the prior three years. This rate of return must be computed as described in Treas. Regs. 1.642-6(c)(2) and 1.642-6(c)(3).
The higher the valuation rate, the lower the donor’s deduction for a gift to a pooled income fund.
Navigating Year-End Deadlines with Your Donors
While many donors think December 31 definitively ends the year, it is important to help them understand that many end-of-year gifts – particularly some planned gifts – require taking action well before the last day of the year to count for tax purposes.
We have developed this article to help better understand what needs to happen when for many common gift types, including gifts of:
Monthly Webinar and Software Training Schedules for 2026
We have established our monthly webinar schedule for 2026. The dates, topics, and presenters are listed below. We will be opening up registration for our 2026 webinars in a few weeks.
1/29/2026: Endowment Building Q&A (FREE) Gary Pforzheimer
2/26/2026: Using Donor Surveys in Planned Gift Marketing Russell James, Texas Tech University
3/26/2026: The Life of a Legacy Match: Turning Inspiration Into Action Abby Quammen and Meryl Cosentino, New York University
4/30/2026: Practical Uses of AI in Gift Planning Ericka Webb, Boston College
5/28/2026: Less Cash, More Bling: Accepting Atypical Assets Bill Laskin and Kara Morin
6/25/2026: Planned Giving Marketing Q&A (FREE) Andrew Palmer
7/30/2026: Bequests Gone Bad – Ten Ways to Lose Your Charitable Bequest Andrew Fussner, American Heart Association
8/27/2026: QCDs Q&A (FREE) Client Services Staff
9/24/2026: The Right Metrics for Gift Planning Craig Wruck
10/22/2026: The Lead Trust Paradox: Powerful for Donors, Rare in Practice – Here’s How to Change That Alasdair Halliday, Harvard University
11/19/2026: Real Estate, Why Wait? Diane Thornton and Christa Lewis, The Nature Conservancy
12/17/2026: Gift Annuity Regulations and Compliance Q&A (FREE) Edie Matulka and Julie Goldenberg Hay
7/7/2026, 7/14/2026, 7/21/2026, and 7/28/2026: Fundamentals of Planned Giving course (offered in four weekly sessions next July) Craig Wruck
On November 14, we announced our annual update of CGA Manual: The Complete Guide to Gift Annuities (CGA Manual) to our electronic subscribers. Formerly known as Charitable Gift Annuities: The Complete Resource Manual, the print version of the update is in production and should be in the mail within the next two weeks.
Whatever your gift annuity question, the answer is in the CGA Manual. State regulations, special situations, every funding asset imaginable, best practices. The CGA Manual covers that and much more! The manual comes with 50 prototype letters and documents that you can adapt for use in your work.
For just $75/year, you can have the electronic CGA Manual at your fingertips and be on your way to an exceptional gift annuity program.
Learn more about the CGA Manualon our website, and contact Client Services at support@pgcalc.com or 888-474-2252 to order a copy.
It Was Great to See So Many of You at CGP!
Many of us from PG Calc were at the National Association of Charitable Gift Planners Conference in Indianapolis this October. We always enjoy seeing good friends and learning about the latest and greatest in planned giving. Thanks to many of you who stopped by our booth to say hello, attended our pre-conference training session, and learned from Craig Wruck in his pre-conference workshop. We hope you had as much fun as we did!
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