Estate Guardian is the operational platform for nonprofit planned giving teams — from bequest notification through final distribution, and every CGA compliance deadline in between.
No credit card. No IT approval. No procurement process.
The Problem
Your CRM tracks donor relationships. It doesn't track estates in administration. So you open a spreadsheet. Copy an old template. Email the team. Add a calendar reminder. Save the will PDF to a shared drive folder no one remembers to check.
Then next week, another estate. And another. Suddenly you're managing twenty open cases spanning eighteen months of probate, four executors, three law firms, and a stack of PDFs. And you're the only one who knows where anything lives.
"Efforts to make certain that gifts through bequests and trusts are given proper attention after the donor passes away may slip through the cracks of an organization... inaction ultimately resulted in the loss of millions of dollars."
"Data in spreadsheets not visible to others. Easy for others to make embarrassing mistakes."
The Solution
Raiser's Edge tracks intentions. PG Calc handles calculations. Crescendo runs CGA payments. None of them track the actual estate — the executor correspondence, the probate deadlines, the document collection, the distribution. That's the gap every planned giving team has been papering over with spreadsheets. Estate Guardian closes it.
Every estate gets a workflow the moment it opens. Deadlines auto-generate. Overdue tasks surface immediately. When staff turn over, institutional knowledge stays behind.
Every field on every screen maps to something you're already tracking. No developer guessed at what "residual bequest" means. No consultant billed hours to configure "estate administration" into a CRM. It's built in.
CGA payment schedules, state reserve tracking, IRS reporting reminders — all built to the standards your finance office and auditors expect. Full audit trail on every action.
Inside Estate Guardian
One record per estate from notification through final distribution. Donor, executor, attorney, documents — all linked.
Auto-generated tasks for statutes, filings, and follow-ups. Nothing runs past a statute of limitations because you forgot to check.
Wills, codicils, inventories, accountings, distributions — filed against the estate they belong to. Searchable, auditable, exportable.
Payment schedules, state reserve calculations, and filing reminders — no separate desktop software required.
Every touchpoint logged against the estate. Pick up any conversation without hunting through email threads.
Real-time view of open cases, estimated distributions by quarter, and total anticipated revenue. Answer your CFO without opening Excel.
Probate procedures and CGA regulations by state, at your fingertips. No more Googling in the middle of a case.
Multi-user by default. Full context on every case, so no bequest walks out the door when a colleague does.
The Builder
Estate Guardian was built by Shauna Scherer, an experienced nonprofit fundraising professional who built and grew a planned giving operation for a major national nonprofit.
She spent years administering estates from the same spreadsheets you're using today — chasing executors, missing distributions, watching institutional memory walk out the door with every staff transition. Estate Guardian is the tool she wished existed.
Not a CRM retrofitted for gift planning. Not a calculation tool bolted onto an old codebase. A modern, operational platform built from the perspective of the person actually doing the work — grounded in estate administration best practices, not legalese.
Built to be trusted
Your donors trusted you with their legacy. We take that seriously.
Optional two-factor authentication using any authenticator app.
TLS 1.3 in transit. AES-256 at rest. bcrypt password hashing.
All data stored in US-based, redundant cloud infrastructure.
Full data export at any time. No lock-in, no hostage situations.
Why not just use...
Raiser's Edge is a great donor database. Salesforce NPSP is a great CRM. Neither was built to run estates in administration. That's why every planned giving team ends up with a shadow spreadsheet.
| The work | Raiser's Edge / NPSP | PG Calc / Crescendo | Estate Guardian |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bequest intention tracking | Yes, in legacy view | Actuarial only | Yes, modern UI |
| Probate deadline workflow | No | No | Built in |
| Executor communication log | Awkward workarounds | No | Built in |
| Estate document management | Media tab, no metadata | No | Filed to the estate |
| CGA payment + compliance | No | Yes, separate tool | Same platform |
| Setup time | Weeks + consultant | Install + license | 10 minutes |
The Great Wealth Transfer is here. Your operational infrastructure needs to be ready for it.
Start your 14-day free trialNo credit card required. Full access. Cancel anytime.
FAQ
No. Estate Guardian is complementary. Keep your donor CRM for cultivation and stewardship — Estate Guardian owns the estate administration workflow that CRMs were never designed for.
Most teams are fully operational the same day they sign up. If you already have a spreadsheet of open estates, migrating them takes an afternoon. No implementation project. No consultant.
Even at three or four open estates, the average bequest is $150,000 — a single case that falls through the cracks costs more than years of Estate Guardian. And bequest volume is trending up sharply across the sector.
In redundant, US-based cloud infrastructure with automatic backups. Encrypted at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS 1.3. Full data export is available at any time — you're never locked in.
Reach out to us before the trial ends and we'll get you set up on a plan that fits your team. If you decide it's not for you, no obligation — your data is yours to export.
Shauna Scherer — a career planned giving professional who built and grew a gift planning operation for a major national nonprofit. Estate Guardian is her answer to years of watching estates run on spreadsheets.