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.