I think about this every year. Alfred Nobel created the prizes in his will, with a bequest. A charitable bequest. That is the most popular of all the planned gifts and the bedrock of every Planned Giving program. I explained why in this 2009 article for GuideStar, “Get Going On Planned Giving.” (I think I could have done a better job with that title.) Nobel was an ideal prospect for a charitable bequest because he had no immediate family. He never married. Don’t end your prospect list there, but if you’re looking for a good starting point, it gets no better than people who love your work and have no close relatives.

He didn’t go about it the right way though. He wrote the will himself. That’s called a holographic will and it can create problems. It did for Nobel. Other family challenged the will. He left a big chunk of his estate to fund the prizes and that angered his heirs who felt shortchanged. A holograph greatly increases the chances that a gift to your charity will be challenged.

Strongly advise your donors to have a lawyer prepare wills that contains gifts to your charity. Plead with them if you have to. If they flatly refuse–and some will–their gift is less likely to make its way to you than if they had hired an attorney.

The Nobel prizes would have been awarded five years earlier, but the will contest took that long to resolve.

There’s a cool 17-minute slide show about his will (and the gun-toting intrigue around it), and its actual language at Nobelprize.org.