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Charitable Giving

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Presenter: Russell James III, J.D., Ph.D., CFP®

Hour I: Top 10 Charitable Planning Strategies for Financial Advisors

This session gives the top approaches to helping your clients and growing your practice using charitable planning. Participants will learn how to provide tremendous benefit to clients, while improving their own assets under management, with charitable planning. Topics include gifts from retirement plans, gifts of appreciated assets, the use of private foundations, and life insurance.

Learning Objectives
By the end of the session, attendees will:

  • Understand the benefits of coordinating qualified plans and charitable giving
  • See examples of methods to avoid capital gains tax by using charitable planning
  • Understand the upcoming demographic trends affecting charitable planning

Hour II: Words That Work: The phrases that encourage planned giving

How do you ask for a bequest gift? How should you describe a complex gift to generate the most interest? This presentation shares results from a series of recent surveys uncovering the words and phrases that work best to encourage interest in planned giving. Dr. James begins with an overview of the neurological processes that drive charitable decision-making and explains how these processes link to the survey results on optimum word choice. Learn practical, scientifically-based approaches that will increase your effectiveness in communicating about planned giving.

Learning Objectives
By the end of the session, attendees will:

  • The neural basis for using “family words” in a charitable context
  • See documented examples of the power of social norms in descriptions
  • Understand the value of communicating “obliquely” about death related topics
Russell James III, J.D., Ph.D., CFP® - Professor, Dept. of Personal Financial Planning, Texas Tech University

Russell James III, J.D., Ph.D., CFP®
Professor, Dept. of Personal Financial Planning, Texas Tech University
Russell James III, J.D., Ph.D., CFP® is a professor in the Department of Personal Financial Planning at Texas Tech University. He holds the CH Foundation Chair in Personal Financial Planning and directs the on-campus and online graduate program in Charitable Financial Planning. Additionally, he teaches Charitable Gift Planning at the Texas Tech University School of Law. He graduated, cum laude, from the University of Missouri School of Law where he was a member of the Missouri Law Review. While in law school he received the United Missouri Bank Award for Most Outstanding Work in Gift and Estate Taxation and Planning. He also holds a Ph.D. in consumer economics from the University of Missouri, where his dissertation was on charitable giving.Prior to his career as an academic researcher, Dr. James worked as the Director of Planned Giving for Central Christian College in Moberly, Missouri for 6 years and later served as president of the college for more than 5 years, where he had direct and supervisory responsibility for all fundraising. During his presidency the college successfully completed two major capital campaigns, built several new debt-free buildings, and more than tripled enrollment.

Dr. James has over 150 publications in academic journals, conference proceedings, and books.
These predominantly focus on statistical analysis and neuroimaging analysis related to gifts, estates, and property. He has been quoted on charitable and financial issues in a variety of news sources including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, ABC News, U.S. News & World Report, USA Today, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News and the Chronicle of Philanthropy and his financial neuroimaging research was profiled in The Wall Street Journal’s Smart Money Magazine.