Terms:
- Guideline Agreements (GA) – a document listing the conditions or stipulations for the donor’s gift. These conditions/stipulations are legally binding for Penn State. The contents of these vary depending on purpose(s), but may include items such as the donor’s purpose, student eligibility, awardee selection procedure, amount of award, term(s) of award, how the endowment will be managed, etc. The Office of Gift Acceptance has created a sample Guideline Agreement and Guideline Agreement FAQs available on LaunchPad > Resources > Gift Acceptance > Sample Guideline Agreement.
- Statements of Donor Intent (SODI) – a document created to capture a donor’s intention for the use of funds that will not be received until a future date (i.e. monies from their future estate, the remainder of a charitable remainder unitrust, the residuum of a charitable gift annuity, a beneficiary designation of a life insurance policy, etc) and locks in the current minimum for that specific type of endowment. When we receive funding, the SODI will be converted to a GA (assuming we receive sufficient funding as documented in the SODI). The Office of Gift Acceptance has created a sample Statement of Donor Intent available on LaunchPad > Resources > Gift Acceptance > Sample Statement of Donor Intent
General Overview:
Based on conversations with a potential donor, the development officer initiates a solicitation request/proposal in Advance Web (AWA) which then goes through the solicitation review process. Once this solicitation request/proposal is in a certain approval stage, development personnel use the GuideLION applicaton to complete a questionnaire. Once this GuideLION questionnaire is submitted, it is reviewed, approved, and then documents (Guideline Agreement or Statements of Donor Intent) are created. The GA/SODI is then released for donor signatures (refer to “Note regarding Donor Signatures” below). At this point, a new allocation code can be requested (instructions are found at https://www.lionlink.psu.edu/XP_AllocCodeReq.nsf/instructions.xsp). The GA/SODI is then either delivered to the donor(s) for their signature or Gift Acceptance sends the GA/SODI to the donor(s) for electronic signature(s). Finally, the signed GA/SODI is scanned and stored in iFiles for historical purposes.
Link to GA/SODI Process flowchart
Note regarding Donor Signatures: Donors can sign GA/SODI documents either physically or electronically. If you would like to have the donor sign the document electronically, contact Gift Acceptance and they will send the Guideline Agreement or Statements of Donor Intent to your donors. Please send a message to David McGoron (dmm587@psu.edu), Andrea Mitchell (ack131@psu.edu), and Emily McGinley (ejm5985@psu.edu). In your request, please include an email address for each donor that needs to sign. If the donors are spouses and they only have one email address, please note so in your request. Once you submit your request, please let your donor know that they will be receiving a message from Gift Acceptance asking them to sign. The process to sign is very simple and intuitive, but if you or your donors have questions they may reach out to Gift Acceptance. If your donor does not sign within a week, they will be reminded each week thereafter.
If you have requested Gift Acceptance to send your document to your donor via Adobe Sign, Gift Acceptance will automatically send the document to your dean/chancellor to sign as well. Thus, please inform your dean/chancellor of this new signing protocol and that they will be expected to use Adobe Sign if a Guideline Agreement or Statement of Donor Intent has been sent to your donor through that system.
Please contact David McGoron (dmm587@psu.edu) with any questions. We are excited to offer this option to our donors and to simplify our routing process.