How have professional advisors impacted your development strategy? [Coffee Talk]
MargaretOwenSpiak
Posts: 2 ✭✭
Use this discussion to share experiences and best practices to supplement the Coffee Talk, Working with Professional Advisors. Other topics of discussion include:
- What role do professional advisors play in your organizations?
- What are some ways foundations can help professional advisors and their clients?
- What approaches have you seen work or not work in your engagement with professional advisors?
- Do you hold events, programming, or educational opportunities for professional advisors?
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KentWeimer
Posts: 121 ✭✭✭
We have an active and engaged council of professional advisors at Parkland Foundation. We meet quarterly at 8 am. Our goal is to have them become educated advocates. At the meetings they hear from some content expert on a program our foundation is funding. Most of our advisors are generous supporters of the foundation and many have engaged clients with us. We have raised millions of $ from the direct work of advisors with their clients.
One of the ways I have engaged individual advisors is by becoming a member of our local estate planning council. This offers an extraordinary networking opportunity.
To make our council look more like the community we serve, we are actively recruiting younger and minority advisors. We had one meeting where we requested that each member bring a guest. We got several great candidates from that meeting.
We have asked members of larger firms to bring in a younger colleague to join us so we have a built in transition for when the older advisor retires.
A side benefit is that membership on the council has been an amazing pathway to serve on our board of directors. We currently have five board members who are on our advisor council.
I love working with my professional advisors. It is one of the highlights of my job.
Thanks.
Kent C. Weimer, Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy®
Director of Trusts, Estates and Gift Planning
Parkland Foundation
2
Answers
Thank you all for your participation in today's coffee talk! What a great discussion around engaging Professional Advisors. There were so many questions we didn't have time to answer so I posted a few of those below-- can you help out your peers?
-I'd love to hear how different Community Foundations are using CSuite tools for segmenting and engaging their PA network.
-We're considering starting a PA Council vs just engaging individually...advice? Pros/cons?
-If you are holding events for professional advisors, what time of day is working well?
-For CFs just starting to do outreach to PAs, I'd love to hear from others on tips and tricks.
-I'm curious about KPI's around engagement with PAs. How do others track or more importantly how to they monitor the outcomes of their effort, to the gift?
-Does anyone do a professional advisor newsletter (via email)? If so, how did you get that started, etc?
-We have a pretty well-established committee of professional advisors who've been working with us for years, but they're largely white and nearing retirement age--not super representative of our community. Any successful ideas to engage professional advisors from more diverse backgrounds (age, race and ethnicity, gender identity, and so on)?
@MargaretOwenSpiak
We have an active and engaged council of professional advisors at Parkland Foundation. We meet quarterly at 8 am. Our goal is to have them become educated advocates. At the meetings they hear from some content expert on a program our foundation is funding. Most of our advisors are generous supporters of the foundation and many have engaged clients with us. We have raised millions of $ from the direct work of advisors with their clients.
One of the ways I have engaged individual advisors is by becoming a member of our local estate planning council. This offers an extraordinary networking opportunity.
To make our council look more like the community we serve, we are actively recruiting younger and minority advisors. We had one meeting where we requested that each member bring a guest. We got several great candidates from that meeting.
We have asked members of larger firms to bring in a younger colleague to join us so we have a built in transition for when the older advisor retires.
A side benefit is that membership on the council has been an amazing pathway to serve on our board of directors. We currently have five board members who are on our advisor council.
I love working with my professional advisors. It is one of the highlights of my job.
Thanks.
Kent C. Weimer, Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy®
Director of Trusts, Estates and Gift Planning
Parkland Foundation