PG Calc's Featured Article

PG Calc Re-brands

For those you who have visited our website over the last few weeks or attended NCPG, you may be aware that something is stirring at PG Calc.

Over the last few years, we've made a number of changes that have had significant impact on the practice of planned giving in general and our own firm in particular. None was bigger than our merger with Frank Minton's Planned Giving Services (PGS) in 2005. It strengthened our consulting capabilities in ways we couldn't have imagined beforehand, incorporating not only unparalleled technical knowledge about planned giving, but also vast practical experience in marketing planned gifts and working with donors. We've made great strides in gift administration as well. And our flagship software products, including Planned Giving Manager (PGM), have continued to be adopted widely by new and growing programs.

The Goal
These changes and more prompted us over the course of the last year to look closely at our brand and define exactly what it is that we stand for, and why this understanding is important for our clients, various stakeholders in planned giving, and for us at PG Calc.

The Research
As we re-defined our brand, we turned to our clients for help. We were excited to learn as a result of the primary research we conducted that our products and services are highly valued. We were thrilled to hear clients say, for example, that they consider our service to be of the highest quality; in fact, many of them said it's among the highest quality service they have experienced in any industry for any product.

The theme that reappeared most often during this research was our clients' understanding of our collective commitment to their missions. In fact, we view it as stronger than commitment. Staff members including client support staff, managers, and executive staff point out with frequency that when a client contacts us with a gift planning problem, we see more than a problem - we see and understand the potential for a gift to a cient organization, and we feel invested in that gift.

Inspired by this research, we've chosen to sum up our brand personality in a single phrase: "Invested in Your Mission". While we are proud to use that as our tagline, we believe it extends more widely than the term "tagline" implies.

The Capabilities
PG Calc has previously presented our capabilities in the categories of gift planning, program planning, and gift administration. However, our array of products and services now goes well beyond that. We concluded that the presentation and organization of our service portfolio did not truly represent our capabilities.

With the goal of making it easier how we can play a larger, often more strategic role in your program, we will now communicate our services in the context of five lines of business: Consulting, Marketing, Calculations & Proposals, Education, and Gift Administration.

Consulting
About three years ago, PG Calc acquired Planned Giving Services (PGS), Frank Minton's Seattle-based planned giving consulting firm. Our merger facilitated internal knowledge sharing with benefits for everyone - a larger pool of resources for answering client questions, tracking the latest tax rulings, developing product designs, and just about every other other aspect of serving our customers. Our planned giving consulting practice is quite sizeable now, with consultants on the West Coast, East Coast, and Midwest, and we continue to enhance our breadth of expertise. For example, one of our declared 2008 objectives was to develop capabilities to provide strategic marketing consulting to our clients - and we've accomplished that.

Marketing We've been playing a role in marketing planned giving from our beginning. In fact, PGM features as core functionality the production of attractive, easy-to-read, and compelling planned gift proposals. In recent years, we've seen marketing become an increasingly desired competency in the planned giving world, and we felt it made sense to create a home in our services suite for the discipline. In tandem with our marketing consulting, we've developed tools to facilitate communications about your planned giving program and generate leads, such as GiftStory, our multimedia planned gift presentation software, and BatchCalcs, our service for enhancing mailings with personalized planned gift calculations.

Calculations and Proposals Almost 25 years ago, we introduced Planned Giving Manager, our calculation and proposal software package that instantly became a standard in the planned giving arena. Today, many updates later, PGM remains the software of choice for thousands of planned giving programs around the country. In 1999, we inaugurated GiftCalcs, the online gift calculations service that provides educational benefit to clients' Web visitors as well as lead generating capabilities to client charities. Our presence in planned giving calculations and proposals has been and remains strong.

Education
We've gone to great lengths to strengthen and enhance our role in education. PG Calc staff members are recognized experts and former gift planners, and as such, design and teach courses on topics as diverse as the ins and outs of individual gift vehicles, strategies for working effectively with major gifts staff, and recognizing planned giving potential in donors. We offer educational content in classrooms, published guides, and in our widely acclaimed Webinar format.

Gift Administration
Our gift administration services are second to none. Many of America's largest charities and asset managers rely on us to administer tens of thousands of gift annuities and pooled income fund gifts for them. GiftWrap, our database application created specifically for planned gift administration, helps many of them meet the highest standards of donor, beneficiary, and prospect stewardship by allowing them to manage the process themselves. More and more, charities and the organizations that serve them depend on us for the gift administration services we provide.

The Impact
During the course of our rebranding process, our clients helped us understand what the nature of the PG Calc brand is - products with meaningful functionality that allow development staff to do their jobs better, high quality service to clients on every single interaction, and a high-impact contribution to the practice of planned giving. We believe PG Calc is an entity in which a great many individuals in planned giving have a stake. Our new brand reinforces our existing relationships of trust and represents the symbolic change that was required to accommodate the functional changes happening under our surface.

We've contributed to the success of thousands of planned giving programs since our founding in 1985. Whether we've been contributing to a program from its infancy or were brought in to enhance a mature one, we are proud to be invested in the mission of every single one of our clients.