Inspired Philanthropy : Your Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Giving Plan is designed to assist individual donors with a desire to create and implement a responsible giving plan. Regardless of the donor’s net worth, this book shows how to create a plan that advances the giver’s capacity to promote social change. For fundraisers, it provides a useful tool to inform and reassure donors.

The authors begin by grounding the reader in a context of the nonprofit sector and philanthropy. According to Gary and Kohner, “Part One gives you (potential donor) the chance to examine your own giving patterns, and helps you identify the skills that you bring to the nonprofit sectors. The exercises and examples will guide you through the process of creating a mission statement for your giving and for naming specific goals for the amounts of money and time you want to give.

“Part Two provides useful information on how to work with nonprofits as a donor, what vehicles and strategies you might want to consider to direct your giving, ideas for sparking children and teenagers to give, and a chapter for donors giving $25,000 or more.”

Useful appendices

It doesn't end there. The appendices contain a visual depiction of the Inspired Giving model, additional ideas on being an effective giver, a section on considering making loans to friends, breaking barriers to effective giving, sample letters, and an extensive resource section listing useful materials. The figures, tables, worksheets and exercises are invaluable. And this second edition contains updated statistics and current information on a wide variety of giving vehicles, including family and community foundations, ePhilanthropy and venture philanthropy.

The “Father of Progressive Philanthropy”, David R. Hunter, said the book is “an ingenious mixture of philanthropic philosophy, personal accounts of how some individuals have handled their giving, and, most interesting, a rich section of exercises to lead the reader through the gift-making process. This step-by-step guide can help your donors want to do philanthropy the way it should be done.”