Greg Lichti already had a good relationship with Ron. Ron was a high-net-worth CEO and a grateful patient at Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation in Toronto. He and his wife had connected deeply with his oncologist, Dr. Smith. The physician had vision; Ron had gratitude and resources. Greg had been brought in to help shape what that could look like. A million-dollar fellowship endowment emerged as the right fit. It was something that would fund young cancer researchers in perpetuity, a natural match for a man who had spent his career as a mentor.
There was one problem. Ron was dying. And given his other financial obligations, he felt he could only commit $500,000 as a current gift.
Then Greg asked a question that changed everything.
He had recently learned that companies often carry key-person life insurance on their CEOs. On a hunch, he asked Ron whether that applied to him. It did. With some creative structuring—Ron took ownership of the policy and paid the premiums that would have otherwise lapsed when he retired—another $500,000 came through the insurance when Ron died, thus realizing a million-dollar gift. And the remaining value of the policy, another $4 million, went to family members and other charities Ron cared about.
“We would not have come to that conclusion if I had asked that question and brought Ron’s financial advisors in,” Greg reflected. That one question, grounded in education and genuine curiosity about how Ron’s wealth was held, made all the difference.
This collaboration is the heart of blended giving, and most of us are leaving it on the table.
The Insight That Changes How You Work
At an AHP session on integrating major and planned giving at the 2026 Convene Canada conference, Greg and his longtime colleague Jill Nelson, both now senior consultants at Global Philanthropic Canada after nearly two decades together structuring blended gifts at Princess Margaret, made the case for a simple but profound reframe: “How wealth is held determines how best to give.”
Your donors may have every intention of supporting your institution at a transformative level. But if the only giving vehicle you’re discussing is a check, you’re working with a fraction of the picture, since the vast majority of donors’ assets are not held in cash. Most of us know this intellectually, but far fewer of us are doing anything about it in our donor conversations.
The reason, Jill and Greg argue, is silos. Major gift officers stay in their lane. Planned giving professionals wait to be brought in. And the donor, who doesn’t think in organizational chart terms at all, gets a fragmented experience of the institution they love.
“Donors really don’t distinguish between the major gifts person and the planned giving person,” Greg said. “They want to support us in many different ways.”
Breaking Down the Silos
The antidote to siloed thinking is surprisingly low-tech: plan together. Do your major gift officers know what your planned giving colleagues are working toward, and vice versa?
Jill recommends learning each other’s goals and stumbling blocks and building some shared KPIs that point everyone in the same direction. That might mean setting a team goal of having two or three fully integrated donor conversations per year, then building from there.
Greg also flagged that major gift officers don’t need to become planned giving experts. They just need to know enough to recognize an opportunity and ask a question.
“It is always okay when you’re talking with a donor to say, ‘I don’t know the answer to that question. I’ll get back to you,’” Jill said.
Knowing who to call next is the whole game. And don’t forget the teams you don’t usually think of as frontline fundraising partners: when a gift arrives from a Donor Advised Fund, does your database team know to flag that donor for stewardship? These are whole-organization conversations worth starting now.
Building Relationships with Financial Advisors
One of the session’s most practical threads was about financial advisors: when to engage them, how to think about the relationship, and what to expect.
The first thing to get clear on is that advisors are partners in execution, not referral sources. Jill was candid about this. Advisors can introduce donors to a cause they care about, and they can make complex gifts structurally possible. But expecting an advisor to proactively steer clients toward your organization is generally not how it works.
What advisors can do is something just as valuable: they know how their clients’ wealth is held. In Ron’s case, Greg needed an advisor in the room to figure out how to structure the insurance policy transfer.
Jill and Greg recommend building a small, trusted circle of advisors such as lawyers and financial planners before you need them. When you know advisors before a complex situation arises, it’s a lifeline.
“That basis of trust and partnership is there already when opportunities come along,” Greg said.
Jill cautioned against taking it a step further and forming a formal advisory committee. In her experience, such committees often turned into “make-work” projects where she scrambled to fill the agenda for each meeting. A colleague you can call informally when a donor proposes an unusual gift structure is worth far more.
Starting the Blended Gift Conversation
None of this requires a complete organizational overhaul before you can take a step forward. At Princess Margaret, Greg and Jill used a simple one-page “Ways to Give” handout in conversations with major donors that included sections about cash, securities, donor advised funds, and bequests. The handout was a natural way to open up the question of how to give, not just how much. When it became clear that assets or an estate component were in play, Greg would have a conversation with Jill, who was the planned gift expert, and then ask the donor’s permission to bring her in for her deeper expertise.
The process allowed them to stay donor-centered and aligned. And it produced gifts that wouldn’t have been possible any other way.
Your donors want to support your organization in all the ways they can. The question is whether you’ll ask.
