Forward Thinking

  • Give Back 5: A Scalable Model for Engaging the Next Generation of Planned Givers

Speaker: Jessica Martin

Discover how the Greater Salina Community Foundation engaged the next generation of donors through Give Back 5, a simple but powerful community-wide giving pledge. This session will share how the campaign generated 133 planned gifts in its first year by inviting donors to designate 5% of their IRA or investment accounts to charity. Attendees will learn the key messaging, touchpoints, and collaborative strategies behind the effort—and gain actionable tools to replicate this scalable model in their own communities.

  • Maximum Gifts with Cresi AI eNewsletters

Speaker: Charles Schultz and Elaine Yamasaki

With 7,000 to 10,000 marketing touches a day on your donors, all nonprofits need more visibility. The primary method for increasing your welcome, positive contacts is the weekly eNewsletter. Many GiftLegacy users have said they would like to send out more weekly eNewsletters, but they are not creative writers and it is time consuming to write the headers. Some have asked whether Crescendo would write custom headers for their eNewsletters. The good news is that Cresi AI now will write custom eNewsletter headers! Cresi AI will write a custom weekly header that covers all of the popular gift plans. You can schedule the distribution dates and will have five days to edit your custom headers. Cresi AI builds a sophisticated prompt and uses a creative template each week to produce your custom header. This is a huge step forward in the use of Generative AI to produce custom marketing materials.

  • The 2026 Playbook: Maximizing Donor Charitable Giving Through QCDs and Blended Gifts

Speaker: Scott Harkey

The 2026 Playbook: Maximizing Donor Charitable Giving Through QCDs and Blended Gifts" will serve as an essential guide for nonprofit professionals to navigate the major charitable giving tax law changes introduced by the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB). Already in effect, the OBBB introduce new "floors" for itemizers, where only contributions exceeding 0.5% of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) are deductible and a 35% cap on the value of those deductions for top earners. Moving forward, Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs) have emerged as an extremely tax-efficient vehicle for donors aged 70½+, as they are excluded from gross income and bypass these new limitations entirely. With the 2026 QCD limit rising to $111,000 per individual and the opportunity to direct up to $55,000 toward a Charitable Gift Annuity (CGA), gift officers have a unique window to secure blended gifts that combine immediate mission support with long-term legacy impact through simple IRA beneficiary designations and annuities.

Understanding these strategic shifts is critical for nonprofit leaders to help donors reduce taxable income, meet their philanthropic goals, and ensure nonprofit missions keep moving forward in a post-OBBB world.

  • Sparking Next Gen Donors Into Action

Speaker: Julia Patrick

Donor demographics are shifting in a dramatic manner. If your nonprofit is treating Next Gen donors that same as Baby Boomers, Gen Xs, or even Millennials its time to recalibrate. Learn from Julia C. Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy and host of The Nonprofit Show about Next Gen donors and what they react to. This wave of donors is thinking differently about philanthropic investment and, at the same time, controlling vast inherited resources from the Great Wealth Transfer.

Get ahead of building strategies for Next Gen donors and get a plan for cultivating relationships that sparks engagement with your nonprofit mission.

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