The Endowment Handbook

In The Endowment Handbook: The Complete Guide to Building a Resilient Cause, veteran fundraising and nonprofit strategist Laura MacDonald delivers a comprehensive overview of endowments, reserves, and the donors who create them. The book explores the impacts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the pandemic, and social movements. It explores dramatic shifts in donor behavior, market performance, and donor perception of endowed funds (both positive and negative), as well as the growing understanding of strategic reserves. You'll learn how to attract new kinds of assets, from donor advised funds to cryptocurrency, and build relationships that will sustain your cause into the future. You'll also discover how to execute critical endowment and reserve strategies, like preplanning, identifying and cultivating prospective donors, marketing, and measuring your progress. The Endowment Handbook contains technical information describing the nature and structure of endowments, as well as some of the emerging critiques of this longstanding nonprofit funding mechanism, and a discussion of the rise of strategic reserves as a complement to endowment. It also explores effective messaging strategies for endowment funds, including techniques like the "follow-the-leader" effect and the use of "donor agency" as an effective fundraising tool. The author also examines emerging technologies, like data screening, social media outreach, new behavioral research, and artificial intelligence, that you can use to increase donor engagement. Interest in the financial sustainability of various nonprofit structures continues to grow and evolve. The Endowment Handbook is a key addition to that discussion, making it an ideal resource for those who manage, serve, or teach about all types of nonprofits. It applies equally to healthcare and human services, universities and museums, and anyone else seeking to leverage the enormous generational transfer of wealth to fuel a cause.