Creating a giving strategy will benefit you and the community you care about by ensuring you're donating in a meaningful way to the right organizations at the right time.
Many people donate significant amounts of money to charities each year without a real plan. While this is still fantastic, creating a giving strategy ensures you’re donating in a meaningful way that aligns to your values and interests. It can also ensure you’re minimising tax by ensuring your donations are made to the right organisations at the right time, in a compliant way.
Whether you’ve set up a charitable structure (such as a Private Ancillary Fund), a sub-fund within a Public Ancillary Fund (such as the Be BlueRock Foundation), or you give to charity each year without a formal structure, creating a giving strategy will benefit you and the community you care about.
What Is a Giving Strategy?"
A giving strategy outlines how a donor will achieve their philanthropic goals and objectives. This includes a mission statement, key cause areas that your donations will support, how you want to engage with your recipients, the types of organisations you want to give to, and how much funding you will offer each year.
Developing a giving strategy not only provides structure for your giving, but it promotes a sustainable and reliable pattern of giving to help you leave a lasting legacy. No matter where you are on your philanthropic journey, formalising a strategy that maximises your efforts is a crucial step.
What Is BlueRock’s Giving Strategy?
The process of developing a giving strategy can be quite bespoke depending on how many people are involved in the process and the mission behind the charitable structure.
When BlueRock began the process of setting up the Be BlueRock Foundation back in 2019, we wanted it to be a community effort, so we engaged all our staff in determining the key cause areas for our giving strategy.
A survey was sent out with an extensive list of cause areas to choose from, and we asked our BlueRockers to vote for the cause areas that meant the most to them. From this list, we selected the top 3 responses to build our giving strategy around.
- Conservation and the Environment – Our staff want to support grassroots organisations that protect our environment and aim to build a more sustainable future for generations to come.
- Youth Mental Health – We want to ensure that young people have access to the education and support they need to navigate mental health challenges and build resilience for a strong future.
- Financial Literacy for Vulnerable Cohorts – BlueRock wants to work with and support individuals and families by equipping them with the knowledge and tools to become financially independent.
This was just the beginning of developing our giving strategy. Once our cause areas were decided, we then worked on the vision, purpose and values of the Be BlueRock Foundation. We have also started partnering with charities focused on each of our cause areas and have documented as a business our goals and targets for financial donations, pro bono hours and volunteer work.
This giving strategy will continue to evolve over time as the business grows and changes, and we can adapt to the current issues or needs of the time.
How BlueRock Can Help You Develop a Giving Strategy for Your Business or Family
Through our experience setting up the Be BlueRock Foundation, we’ve worked through the steps involved in developing a giving strategy, and we’re now using this as the blueprint to help our individual, family and business clients set up their own philanthropic strategies.
By engaging our philanthropic consultancy service, we will help you develop your giving strategy by:
- Discussing your reasons for giving, and aligning them to your values, goals and interests
- Identifying cause areas that you’re passionate about
- Prioritising what you would like to give by way of time, talent and treasure
- Assisting in the creation of a mission statement for your own named giving fund, your family, or your business
- Creating a plan for future contributions into the sub fund or charitable structure
- Introducing you to potential organisations that fit within your chosen cause areas
- Completing due diligence on suitable organisations to ensure they are compliant
- Reviewing your strategy with you each year to ensure it still aligns to your goals
Become a Philanthropist by Creating a Giving Strategy That Gives Purpose to Your Wealth
If the burden of receipt keeping, compliance and time spent has become too much for you to manage, or you want to ensure your donations will leave a lasting legacy for your community, talk to us about creating a giving strategy tailored to your family’s or your business’s goals and values. To learn more about the Be BlueRock Foundation’s named giving funds and our philanthropic consultancy service, please get in touch .
