Soapbox

I just read Michael Rosen’s newest blog post, discussing the work of Stephen Pidgeon, who is presenting at the AFP conference in Baltimore later this month. 

Pidgeon not only believes that we’re talking about bequests wrong, he also makes a fascinating point about bequest marketing:

“Linking bequest marketing with planned giving is as daft as using direct mail to solicit major gifts. Most bequests will come from ordinary supporters who passionately believe in the work of the organisation. They will be comfortable, not wealthy, and they know they should write a will. They do not relate to the concept of ‘planning their estate.’”

As I wrote in a previous post, those of us in the planned giving world need to recognize that the vast majority of “planned gifts” come through bequests and that building donor loyalty, increasing donor retention, and crafting good marketing are the best ways to close bequest gifts.

It also leads me to wonder: Are we actually looking at what organizations and donors need from our development programs/staff and are we requiring the correct competencies from our fundraisers?

Do we need planned giving technicians –trained to craft complex gifts of assets - at every organization? Should we insist on more of that expertise from our major gifts staff, who are the folks working with the donors who have the most need/interest in more complex planning? I’ve known far too many major gift officers who are neither trained to nor capable of having these conversation with their donors, but does that mean we need a separate planned gift officer? Or do we demand a greater competency in complex gifts from major gifts officers? If all you do is solicit larger annual gifts, can you really consider yourself a major gifts officer? I'd venture to say the answer is "no".

It seems to me that, if our development departments are to staff up in a way that reflects the reality of how our donors are giving, many organizations should, in addition to hiring better trained major gifts staff, hire donor relations/retention specialists with bequest marketing expertise and the ability to discuss bequest giving with donors. (Of course, one of the reasons we need to have bequest marketing managed in-house is because the majority of our direct response agencies are failing us by just using the same old, totally ineffective marketing tropes, requiring costly and parallel marketing schemes with vendors who DO understand good bequest marketing. Perhaps bequest marketing competencies should be required of our direct response staff and our mail agencies as well).

I can see how this might still leave unmet needs within a development department, but my point is that we need to fundamentally rethink our fundraising silos, job titles, and required competencies.

In my last post, I hope I convinced you that good planned giving officers have to be great marketers. But that’s not all they need to be….

At some organizations, planned giving is seamlessly incorporated into major giving. At other organizations, it’s a rockier road.

Some organizations merge their major and planned giving departments with very mixed results. The marketing side is either neglected or foisted off on their general direct response folks, who don’t have the expertise in planned giving marketing to be effective. And often, following up on leads generated through marketing is perfunctory at best. Because of the pressure to raise immediate funds, they focus on their major donors to the exclusion of those whose major gifts can only come through an estate gift. This leaves an awful lot money on the table, and even worse, their longtime and loyal donors are ill-served and left out in the cold.

Sometimes (too often), planned giving and major gifts departments (and direct response, for that matter) are impenetrable silos, their officers ships passing in the night, guarding their portfolios and their gift credits with sharp claws. Donors, if they have both immediate and deferred strategies, are punted back and forth like footballs, with the planned giving officer never discussing an outright gift and the major gifts officer never discussing a deferred gift. Or maybe they never have a chance to have the missing half of the discussion.

Some organizations are lucky enough and big enough to have very talented and well trained folks in complementary roles: they may have planned giving officers focusing on their loyal and longtime donors, following up on leads from their planned giving direct marketers; they may have philanthropic advisors to help major gifts officers and donors develop multifaceted, multi-asset, and often multigenerational current and deferred giving strategies. They may have a principal gifts team with deep knowledge of complex, asset-based, investment focused giving.

Sigh. A girl can dream.

That’s not most organizations. But donors deserve more than they get from most of us. They are fascinating, complex individuals with shifting and changing financial, planning, business, family, health, and even spiritual needs that an excellent fundraiser who wants to be of good service to their donors needs to understand. Even in a single-person development shop, it’s possible and necessary to know how to provide donors the partnership and opportunities they want and deserve– it just requires a talented fundraiser who values deep and authentic relationships with donors and who has the willingness to learn and grow to meet their donors’ needs.

Are you that kind of fundraiser?

In the 15 years since I first started in planned giving, promotion of legacy gifts has exploded.  Yet – the percentage of people who leave money to charity in their estate plans has not increased. It’s still in the anemic single digits.

Certainly HOW we promote legacy gift is a problem.

Join any planned giving group online, and you’ll see the same question posted over and over: “How can I start a planned giving program at my organization?” Usually with no budget or extra staffing. The answers are predicable: Print a brochure. Put an ad in your newsletters and other publications. Ask your board members and volunteers to make a planned gift. Establish a legacy society.

The trouble is, while this is the bare minimum any organization should be doing, it doesn’t actually do much.

Your marketing is passive. Rather than encourage two-way conversation with your donors, you’re just waiting for them to raise their hands – and why should they?

One of the big issues in planned giving is how to identify the folks who are interested in legacy giving or who have already included our organizations in their plans – while we have to cast a wide net, we also have to be efficient with our time and resources.  There’s a lot of advice out there – who to market to (older donors; long-time donors; all donors; donors targeted with various complex algorithms); how to market; how often to market. But it’s not moving the needle.

If we don’t know who these donors are, it’s very difficult to steward them and ensure that we stay in their plans and it’s hard to justify to our boards why they should keep investing in planned giving.

Your marketing is transactional. We might talk about how these gifts are manifestations of peoples’ deepest values, but really, our marketing just pays lip service to the idea of values. We use all the wrong words.

You are trying to raise planned gifts in a vacuum. If your other fundraising programs are weak and your donor retention is dismal, how can you expect to keep people around long enough to make a planned gift?

Does your marketing use the latest research on what motivates donors to think about legacy gifts, rather than run screaming at the thought of death? Are you sending mailing after mailing to thousands of donors and not hearing a peep in return? Are you scared to use the phone and the internet to reach planned giving prospects? Do you have tools to learn about what your donors care about, where they are in their lives, and how they want you to communicate with them? Do you have a clear view of your donor retention vs. acquisition and are you taking steps to improve it?

If not, you’re doing it wrong.

http://nonprofitwithballs.com/2015/01/pay-staff-more-and-other-resolutions-for-the-nonprofit-sector-for-2015/

Planned giving as it exists now can be an interesting hybrid of major gifts; mid-level giving; financial planning; direct marketing, and stewardship.  We’ll be looking at each of these in a series of posts.

Let’s start with the most disrespected and ignored element of planned giving– direct marketing.

Yes, folks. We are marketers. Don’t like the sound of that, do you? Aren’t we a rarified breed of professional, with the kind of esoteric knowledge that has nothing to do with marketing? Actually, no. At least, not always. But if you are directing a planned giving program and don’t embrace your role as a marketer – or donor engagement specialist, if you will - your program will fail.

We don’t want to talk about the M word. Go to any planned giving conference and there are panels on obscure gifts like lead trusts; in-depth discussions of estate planning techniques; complex donor fact patterns to dissect. There are almost no discussions or panels on marketing. That’s not “real” planned giving. “Real” planned giving is closing a gift of complex assets with a major donor. Us planned giving folks like to jealously guard our positions as “knowers of all obscure tax codes and weird gift structures.” Organizations that receive the majority of their planned gift revenue from realized bequests are dismissed as mere “bequest shops.”

But – what is the goal? To engage donors in our mission, inspire them, and maximize dollars for our organization. For most of us, where is the money coming from? Bequests. This may not be the case at some organizations. But I’ve spent much of my career in progressive advocacy, and at these organizations – some of which are booking $30 million or more in realized bequests each year – 90-99% of ultimate dollars realized come from bequests.

So as the director of my organization’s planned giving program (and the sole member of the planned giving department!) how do I spend my time? I spent a fair amount of my time on developing marketing strategies (partnering with some wonderful consultants who have challenged me to move beyond the traditional - and really ineffective - planned giving marketing strategies) and implementing donor stewardship programs.

Wait a minute, you protest. Shouldn’t you be spending most of your time out of the office meeting with donors? Well, yes, but it depends, and probably not as much as you think, at least as it relates to qualifying planned giving prospects.

The conventional wisdom is that visits are the best way to solicit and close planned gifts (for the purpose of this discussion, let’s limit the planned gifts to bequests and maybe CGAs). While I do try to spend as much time as I can with my donors, and should spend even more, I haven’t heard of any actual data-driven research that supports the idea that qualifying donors and soliciting these gifts in person works best. In fact, Russell James has found that in-person solicitation is pretty low on the list of favorite ways donors like to be solicited for a bequest. 

Let’s stipulate that major/leadership level donors are an entirely different story, and I’ll be coming back to them and how we’re leaving too much money on the table with them in a future post.

But let’s take a look at your “traditional” planned giving donor: longtime loyal donor, maybe at the membership level, maybe at a more robust mid-level, but not a donor who sees herself as a major donor. Hopefully no grandkids! On paper, she or he looks like a fabulous planned giving prospect. But is she really? How about a visit to find out? You've never actually spoken to her, but you're sure she'd love to meet with you to chat about bequests.

Here’s a news flash – they don’t want to meet. At least not until you’ve done a good job engaging them, getting to know them, learning enough about them to be able to speak to their needs and goals, and even then, maybe they still won't want to meet.

These donors want to feel connected to your organization – but they don’t want to feel that they’ve gotten on a development officer's radar to be solicited for bigger gifts. They don’t picture themselves teetering on the very peak of the traditional donor pyramid where we would like to place them. They are being bombarded by a tsunami of generic direct mail and phone calls from the many organizations they support. They feel hounded. And they don't want to talk about death.

If you’re going to spend a majority of your time in front of donors, don’t you think you’d rather start with the ones who actually want that type of engagement and are also likely to make a planned gift? Or who already have made a gift and need stewarding so you don't lose them? And how do you know that they want that kind of personal relationship? You could pull your list of long-time donors and start calling down the list for visits. With enough calls and persistence, you should be able to line them up. But are they the right visits with the right donors? Probably not. 

Or, you could do the marketing that will help you efficiently identify the donors who WANT a relationship with your organization; figure out (maybe by asking them?) the KIND of relationship they want; and use that information to spark their interest in a planned gift. You could do the kind of marketing that encourages donors to disclose their existing gifts, so you can include them in the stewardship necessary to ensure that you STAY in their plans. 

 It all starts with (good) marketing.  

 Look for my follow-up posts, coming soon:

• Your planned giving marketing doesn’t work. You’re just not doing it right.
• Why aren't you using data and new research to drive your fundraising and marketing? Yes, it’s an art. But it’s a science too.
• Working with your major gift team.
• Why a mid-level program is crucial for planned giving success.
• Active stewardship of your legacy donors.

Welcome to my new blog! I look forward to sharing and exchanging ideas with you.

I am a seasoned philanthropy professional with extensive experience in donor relations, stewardship, leadership giving, planned giving and campaign giving. I'm a strategic thinker and planner. I'm passionate about exploring new ways to help donors connect their values and philanthropy with creative and effective ways to fund our shared mission. And I really like debunking conventional wisdom about fundraising.

I have an undergraduate degree in political science from Southern Connecticut State University and a law degree from Case Western Reserve School of Law. I have worked at a number of respected advocacy organizations, including the ACLU and International Rescue Committee. I am currently the Director of Philanthropic Planning at International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region (however, all opinions expressed in this blog are completely my own).

I also work with individuals and families to build values-based philanthropic plans; engage younger family members; evaluate and recommend programmatic priorities for family giving; and help people develop ethical wills and legacy plans.