CGP Conference Takeaways

Earlier this month, my colleague Sabrina Naylor and I attended the National Association of Charitable Gift Planners Conference in Las Vegas. This is the premier national gift planning conference, with three days packed with presentations on all aspects of planned giving. In the years I’ve been attending, I’ve been happy to see an increasing number of panels and discussions focused on marketing – which is the main driver for a successful program but has been under-discussed at our professional conferences. 

Some takeaways:

Worry when long-loyal older donors go silent

In his presentation “Baby Boomers – A Very Special Generation or Just Typical Old People,” Russell James rightly called out the lazy thinking that marketers fall into by assuming that donors of the Boomer generation act differently than generations before them. In reality, evidence and data show that Boomers, as they age, act like other generations at the same age. Much of the so-called differences in how Boomers give can be chalked up to their age cohort, not their generational cohort. 

One very important point that Dr. James highlighted in his other research and reiterated in this presentation: giving drops precipitously at age 75 (with the exception of giving to religious institutions from donors who remain active attendees). The youngest Boomers are only 3 years out from this milestone. Yet, we know that donors update/revise/create their last will or other posthumous giving vehicles about 5 years prior to death. On average, legacy donors die at age 85-88. So, there is a very precarious decade where the donor stops giving; the organizations tries to reinstate them; donor stays lapsed; organizations drops them; they make their final plans some years later and remove the organization in favor of another that stayed in contact. Given that the average bequest can dwarf the lifetime giving of your donors, this is a huge potential loss.

Complicating this is that the majority of donors will not tell an organization that they have included them in their plans. A lapsed donor who has informed the organization of their legacy gift will hopefully continue to be stewarded by the planned giving staff even if outright giving lapses. But if we don’t know about the gift…disaster. 

Lesson 1 – If you have longtime loyal donors who lapse past age 75…. you MUST find ways to stay in touch with them, even if they never reinstate their annual giving. 

As always, Dr. James’ focus on stringent research and evidence-based conclusions, as well as specific actionable recommendations, ensured that his presentation was by far the most useful. If you are not incorporating his work in your legacy marketing plans, you should be.

You need a loyal donor program

It’s not just your long-loyal lapsed donors you need to worry about. We know that years of giving has a strong correlation with legacy giving and it’s imperative for the planned giving and annual giving teams to work together on shared goals. In addition to emphasizing the need for a legacy marketing plan that looks at both strategy and tactics, integrated into your organization’s overall marketing plan, fundraising legend Kathryn Miree warned us of the danger of ignoring our current loyal donors by treating them like anonymous ATMs. 

In our planned giving marketing, we emphasize personalization. Our legacy surveys uncover a wealth of information about our donors’ interests, needs, history, stories. Yet, the appeals and other marketing these donors receive on the annual giving doesn’t incorporate this information. Some organizations can’t even be bothered to personalize the salutation (or get it right)! However, when these are ten-year, fifteen-year, or twenty-year donors, and the organization has no robust loyal donor recognition stewardship, these donors rightly believe they are being taken for granted – and will send their planned gift to organizations that appreciate them. 

Lesson 2: Kathryn shared that “the planned giving team can be knocking it out of the park with its marketing but if the annual fund team treats a 20-year donor in the same way it treats a donor who has never given before, the donor may feel unrecognized and unappreciated which may impact his or her willingness to invest in the charity’s future.”

A recent article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy gave us a tantalizing glimpse of a cross-department loyal donor collaboration by the Nature Conservancy that in its pilot phase, increased legacy gift commitments significantly within one year by focusing on stewarding long-loyal donors. We’ll be following this program closely!

Your planned giving marketing is only as good as your follow up, i.e. the phone is your friend.

Finally, our planned giving colleagues are starting to embrace the evidence-based direct marketing principles well-known by our annual giving friends, and colleagues like Dr. James are providing hard data with actionable steps. We are able to move prospects into our pipelines much earlier and are taking advantage of multi-channel marketing to reach more people. The number of leads we can now generate with a strategic legacy marketing program is exponentially larger than the number we uncovered twenty years ago, when I started in the field. In addition to lead generation, we can do more with respect to qualification, cultivation, conversion, and stewardship though marketing than we ever thought possible. But planned gifts are ultimately built on relationships, and our marketing is often only as good as our follow up.

Legacy surveys are a key part of many organizations’ marketing plans (whether they are good surveys is another matter entirely; if you want to conduct a good one, get in touch). Donors provide deeply personal information (the type that can’t be appended!) and stories. But many fundraisers are following up on the gift intention, not the donor’s story. And then they complain that they donors aren’t calling them back, or don’t want to meet, or that the leads uncovered by marketing just aren’t working out.

But how are they reaching out? Are they calling donors who have expressed an interest in considering a legacy gift and saying “Hi! Thanks for sharing that you’re considering a gift in your will. I just wanted to follow up!”?

Pro tip – this is NOT a great way to get a donor to call you back. Building on the principle of “show ‘em you know ‘em” as reiterated by Kathryn Miree and others at the conference, why aren’t fundraisers taking advantage of what these surveys have to offer?

Follow up on their story: “Hi, I wanted to thank you for sharing your story of <x involvement with the charity>. It meant a lot to us to hear what a wonderful experience it was. I’d love to know more.” Which approach is more likely to start a conversation that may ultimately lead to a discussion about their longer-term needs and plans? 

Lesson 3: Follow up on the story, not the gift. And if your fundraisers or lead qualification team are scared of the phone, get them training or consider whether this is the job for them.