September 10, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
Many nonprofit groups do not have the resources to offer their donors gift annuities, which provide donors with regular earnings in exchange for making a large gift that is invested. When the donor dies, the charity gets all the money left in the annuity.
Now there may be a way for such charities to offer gift annuities, too, according to Frank Minton, a senior adviser at PG Calc, a Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm.
Mr. Minton, a former chair of the American Council on Gift Annuities, said that he has been in discussions with a large nonprofit organization that is considering managing gift annuities for charities nationwide. (Until the organization decides to offer the service, he said, it has requested that he not name it.)
The organization, Mr. Minton said, could begin offering the service early next year and is now seeking to determine charities’ interest by asking them to answer three questions in an online survey.
Charities that use the service, he said, would be charged two fees: The first fee would be a small percentage of the initial gift, and the second would be a modest annual fee that covers the cost of managing the investment and providing payments to donors. There would be no fee on the money that goes directly to charity after a donor dies.
Some community foundations and other institutions offer the same service to charities now, but they do not do so consistently, said Mr. Minton. What’s more, most of those organizations cannot offer the service nationwide, because they aren’t registered in every state that requires it.
