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Determining When Your Foundation is Listed as a Beneficiary

Does anyone have a best practice for identifying when your foundation is listed as a beneficiary for an estate, an IRA account, etc? We ask our donors to let us know, but we have not historically had a great protocol for saving and storing this information and we are not certain we are aware of all of the accounts for which we are listed as beneficiary. Since many commercial firms will not disburse money to a beneficiary unless the beneficiary requests it, we are trying to determine the best way to identify all the accounts we are listed as beneficiary.

Has anyone else faced this issue and found a good solution or best practice? We plan to send a donor survey and include this question but would be interested in other ideas as well.

Thanks!

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    This is a topic that I have brought up at my foundation but we have not created a process for it yet. I'd be curious about other's processes.

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    KarenWolfKarenWolf Posts: 62 ✭✭✭
    Photogenic 5-Year Anniversary First Answer 5 Likes
    edited February 2021

    @ErikaWarren @AshtonWillis We have a form, called Heinz Living Legacy, that we have the donor fill out and then I have a profile type in CSuite to tag the profile. I did a massive project when I started at the Foundation and I have them in one spreadsheet and categorized in our files as Living Legacy, anonymous, un-confirmed. I plan to start working with the unconfirmed but had not thought about the people we don't know about.

    We usually get some sort of communication from the financial institution or lawyer when the donor passes. I would not even know or think to figure out how to find donors that named the Foundation and have passed with money still in their account.

    I am interested to hear others thoughts on this topic!

    Karen Wolf

    Operations Coordinator

    Email karen@cfcwi.org

    Web www.cfcwi.org

    Facebook www.facebook.com/cfcwi


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