Philanthropy Goes Hollywood

Company bets that donors will gain inspiration from a movie

With a $10-million budget and the star power of James Garner, Lee Meriwether, and Brian Dennehy, a movie

being filmed here over the past couple of months could pass for typical Hollywood fare.

But The Ultimate Gift, as the film will be called, has unusual producers — financial advisers attracted to the film’s message that wealthy people need to examine their values and decide what legacy they want to create with their money and their lives. It also has an unusual distribution plan, with preview screenings at a series of charity-sponsored events scheduled for the week before its national release, probably next fall.

“This is a big movie you’ll see in your neighborhood theater,” says Jim Stovall, a motivational speaker and author of the book, The Ultimate Gift, on which the movie is based. “But one of the things that I am most excited about is that charities will be able to use the movie and its message to raise money.”

Some observers are not so sure, however, that charities that get involved with the movie — and the company created to produce it — will enjoy a Hollywood ending. They say some nonprofit groups and donors may be turned off by the way the project appears to make charitable giving into a commodity that can be marketed, and they worry about the involvement of money managers with little experience in philanthropy.

Mr. Stovall himself is an entrepreneur and former investment broker who says he wrote the book on a whim in five days after chatting with a colleague about several different ideas he had for a new book. Mr. Stovall, who lost his sight at the age of 30, has written a number of books, including an inspirational book called You Don’t Have to Be Blind to See, and a collection of interviews called Success Secrets of Super Achievers.

1.7 Million Books Sold

The Ultimate Gift, which Mr. Stovall estimates has sold more than 1.7 million copies in as many as 15 languages since it was first published in 1999, tells the story of Jason, a spoiled young man, and his yearlong quest to find the meaning of life beyond money.

Jason’s great-uncle, a billionaire, who in the movie will be played by Mr. Garner, videotaped messages for his nephew before he died and stipulated in his will that Jason must watch one of them each month in order to receive his inheritance. In each message, the uncle sets up a 30-day task or project Jason must complete. One month, for example, Jason has to identify five people, each of whom need money for a different and compelling reason, and allot to them a portion of $1,500.

Another month, Jason each day has to give away something other than money. He serves lunch at a soup kitchen, sends a poem to a friend, and takes a group of inner-city kids fishing with a Boy Scout troop.

At the end, Jason receives what his rich uncle calls the ultimate gift: the life lessons he learned from each task. He is also handed control of a $1-billion charitable trust established by his uncle.

Last year Mr. Stovall and several others, including a financial-planning consultant and a movie producer, formed a new company called the Ultimate Gift Experience to capitalize on the popularity of the book, which is now published by River Oak, a division of Cook Communications Ministries.

The company’s founders and some of the financial advisers it has recruited have put up money for the movie. Most of the financing, however, has been provided by the Stanford Financial Group, an international private-banking, trust, and asset-management firm.

New Products

Ultimate Gift officials say the book motivates its readers to examine their own values and thoughts about money, and trumpets an inspiring message of philanthropy and volunteerism. Their aim, they say, is to get that message to a wider audience through a major motion picture, one that financial advisers and nonprofit leaders can use as a way to meet, cultivate, and inspire clients and donors through holding advance screenings of the film.

The company is also selling a growing line of products, such as workbooks and journals, as well as services, such as the production of biographical videos, intended to help affluent people deal with the many aspects of their wealth, such as what they want to teach their children about money.

“When people close the book or walk away from the movie, they need an outlet, a way to incorporate what they learned and felt into their own lives,” says Tom Kennedy, president of the Ultimate Gift Experience, in Hingham, Mass. “We realized we could take Jim’s message and develop proprietary materials to help people build on what they read or saw with their own experiences.”

And, he says, charities can use the book’s lessons for their own benefit, too.

According to the company’s literature, the Ultimate Gift Experience — the book, products, movie, and trademarked concepts of how to encourage people to think about their values and money — has “the power to stimulate major gifts, planned gifts, and ultimate gifts.” It tells charities that the financial adviser “becomes the donor’s ambassador for philanthropy, bringing the donor to your door ready to act.”

But some financial advisers and others who work with charities and donors see a downside to nonprofit groups working with the Ultimate Gift Experience. They say that charities could make wealthy donors uneasy by exposing them to financial advisers who may support the movie project simply to recruit new clients.

Others worry that the way the Ultimate Gift Experience is marketing and selling its style of financial planning waters down and commercializes what ought to be a solemn and personal approach to family, money, and charity matters.

“On the one hand, I want to applaud them because we do need to have more conversations that lead to inspired philanthropy,” says Jean Russell, a consultant in Normal, Ill., who helps people, charities, and businesses identify goals and create strategies. “On the other hand, it’s so on the salesy side that it comes off as disingenuous, and you find yourself asking questions: What is the agenda behind this? Are financial planners using the idea of values as just another way to snag clients?”

Paul G. Schervish, a Boston College sociology professor who is working as a consultant to the Ultimate Gift Experience, says the new company doesn’t hide its business interests.

“Yes, they are selling a product, and yes, they are marketing it in a big way,” says Mr. Schervish, who is director of Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy. “There’s no doubt that those advisers want to advance their professional careers by offering added value to their clients. But what they can offer through the Ultimate Gift — an opportunity to provide conscientious reflection on important issues of wealth — is valid stuff. It’s not snake oil.”

Raising Concerns

At the same time, it just might not be for everyone.

Lisa Tracy, a planned-giving consultant in Berkeley, Calif., says she went to a presentation put on by the Ultimate Gift Experience to recruit financial advisers to invest money in the movie or to become members of the company, gaining access to its methods and products. Not only did she think that her clients would find the book and related materials “sappy and insulting to their intelligence,” but, she says, she worried that advisers with no experience dealing with anything but the hard numbers — the allocation of assets, for example — could be getting themselves into deep water.

“It is a way to get the message of thinking about values out broadly, but it is so dumbed down that donors may be turned off and financial advisers may be steered into unfamiliar territory without the proper knowledge and training,” says Ms. Tracy, who founded Philanthropy Vision, a company that helps foundations and wealthy families manage their charitable giving. “Could they show the film, get people excited about philanthropy, and then provide incompetent guidance? It’s very possible.”

Charities, she says, ought to carefully vet the company, its process and products, and the financial advisers involved before they promote the movie and related items, she says. “It’s charities beware.”

Mr. Kennedy says that working with the Ultimate Gift Experience is meant to supplement, not replace, services provided by lawyers and accountants.

“Advisers attracted to this process understand there is more to their clients’ life than wealth,” he says. “They know this starts important conversations and many of them will continue to work with the networks or CPA’s and other people in their community that they go to for certain expertise.”

Philanthropy Veterans

The Ultimate Gift Experience, while a new company, does come with its own experts who have experience in setting up charitable donations.

It is a spinoff of the Legacy Companies, a consulting business for financial advisers, also in Hingham, led by Scott C. Fithian, who has for years been promoting a popular brand of financial and charitable planning based on an individual’s values and goals.

Another Ultimate Gift founder is Paul M. Brooks, a consultant to entrepreneurs, who used to run Renaissance, a planned-giving consulting company in Indiana.

In the last decade or so, plenty of other consulting and financial-services companies, money managers, advisers to the wealthy, and even charity officials have stepped into the same arena as the Ultimate Gift Experience.

What Ultimate Gift has that is new is an innovative marketing push and a showpiece, the movie, that has the potential to attract loads of attention outside the traditional realms of philanthropy and financial planning.

But most of the company’s customers will come from inside those ranks, and that is where it is doing its recruiting.

Planners can pay a one-time, $10,000 fee — or $2,500 up front, plus $999 a year — for the rights to sponsor a screening event and to buy and use the company’s products and services designed to help their clients examine, tell, and preserve their own life stories. Workbooks, diaries, and games are available, as are scripts and materials to help people create such keepsakes as a scrapbook.

The production company working on the motion picture, Film Foundry, based here in Charlotte, can also be hired to make a family’s own video production, or even a videotaped will similar to the one featured in the book and the coming movie. The company says it would cost at least $10,000 to make such a film.

So far, about 70 planners have paid to sign up with the company, though company officials are expecting many more to do so soon as a result of the company’s new partnership with the Financial Planning Association, a national network of 28,000 advisers.

Charities that want a role in the Ultimate Gift’s movie venture pay $5,000 for the right to serve as a host of a screening and a reception afterward. The fee also covers the cost of 250 books and some event-planning materials, such as templates for invitations and playbills. It does not cover theater rental or other costs of the event that the company estimates could total about $15,000.

E. Peter Dubay, national director of the company’s philanthropic-partners program, says the goal is to have as many as 2,000 screenings around the country with about 250 people at each one.

“The book and now the movie will make people start to consider giving more as they evaluate their lives and their values,” says Mr. Dubay, who was a fund raiser at several nonprofit groups for more than 30 years. “If a certain charity is the one getting involved in getting the message out, hosting the movie, hopefully they will be the beneficiary of that increased good will, increased desire to give.”

Hospital Group

Fund raisers for three hospitals have already paid to hold screenings: Winchester Hospital, in Massachusetts; Lancaster General, in Pennsylvania; and Yuma Regional Medical Center, in Arizona. And the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy, a national group of 4,000 fund raisers, has agreed to encourage organizations to get involved.

William C. McGinley, chief executive officer of the health-care group, says his organization already sponsors an Internet-based program to connect advisers with nonprofit health-care institutions.

“We want our professionals to know about the financial planners in their community and for the financial planners to know about our hospitals,” Mr. McGinley says. “The Ultimate Gift program is set up to help make that happen.”

Glenn R. Welch, vice president for development at Winchester Hospital, says he hopes the movie will remind both fund raisers and money managers to focus more attention on the people and values behind a philanthropic gift.

“Too often on the nonprofit side, it’s, Let’s get the gift and move on; and on the for-profit side, it’s, Let’s write this will or draw up this trust and move on,” Mr. Welch says. “Both sides are being shortsighted and limiting the potential to give and get gifts.”

Officials at Yuma Regional Medical Center jumped on the movie project so fast that the center has already given away 250 copies of the book to people who attended a breakfast last month. A board member, Jerry Cullison, a cotton farmer in Wellton-Mohawk Valley, is covering the center’s $5,000 sign-up fee.

“If you learn the lessons of the book, and, I expect, the movie, you’ll automatically become more philanthropic,” Mr. Cullison says. “That’s why I insisted we get involved. People will be better for it, and so will nonprofits.”

Mr. Cullison says that tax considerations have often dictated the type and timing of his charitable gifts, such as the $500,000 he recently pledged to the Yuma hospital for its new open-heart surgery program. But after listening to the book — he popped in the CD version of The Ultimate Gift while driving around his farm this fall — he says he plans to think more deeply about his philanthropy and the values he wants to pass on to his six children and their families.

Such revelations are exactly what financial advisers who are working with the Ultimate Gift Experience say they are starting to unearth.

John M. Dankovich, a wealth manager in Troy, Mich., says he has a client who had been doing what he called checkbook philanthropy, sending $1,000 here or $10,000 there to charities. Recently, however, the client made a major gift to start an institute at his alma mater to teach a curriculum he helped to design.

“He would have never gone down that road before,” says Mr. Dankovich, who paid $10,000 to work with the Ultimate Gift Experience, and was enjoying one of the perks of membership: playing an extra in the movie. Wearing a dark suit, Mr. Dankovich spoke between takes of a funeral scene at a cemetery here.

“Most people don’t connect their wealth to the enduring values of their lives,” he says. “This movie, this process will get people to ask what they stand for and what they want their money to really be about.”