Honoring Generosity of Spirit

I do most of my best thinking out loud (sorry, clients who get stuck on long calls while I’m feeling inspired). Lately, I’ve been ranting and ruminating into a voice recorder while walking my dog in the morning. Poor guy, he’s confused.

But something that keeps surfacing in these sometimes-incoherent ramblings is my worry that we are not showing the same generosity of spirit to our organizations’ supporters as they show to us.

One reason I love legacy giving and the donors who consider these gifts is that the value of the gift is in no way reflected by the ultimate dollar amount pledged or received. It’s in that generosity of spirit, in the hope and sense of possibility these gifts represent. It’s in the desire of a donor to be the type of person who takes care of others and whose sense of “family” is more expansive than any dictionary definition.

It’s beautiful.

Have we forgotten this? Are we so concerned with “closing the sale” with our “highest priority targets” and getting them to sign on the dotted line that we’ve missed this completely? When we say, “every gift, every amount, matters,” are we being truthful? Be honest.

In legacy marketing, it can be challenging when our leadership demands an accounting of ROI for every campaign, and when donors’ lives don’t proceed according to whatever actuarial table they want us to use to calculate future legacy revenue.

?It’s one reason we’ve abused the now-ubiquitous legacy survey to such an extreme.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of surveys and have been using them for a decade. We’re working right now to explore and test different types of surveys with the goal of supporting better conversations with donors.

But they’ve been monetized as products by vendors who justify the costs by encouraging clients to spam their file with surveys and stock their “prospect” lists with far more donors than they can ever hope to truly follow up with. But it’s a number they can show their board as an example of “ROI”, so it’s a reinforcing cycle. It also sets up unrealistic expectations for responses to other types of legacy marketing.

I’m regularly appalled by how often I hear about hundreds and even thousands of surveys sitting in boxes or file cabinets or spreadsheets because no one has time to even read them, much less follow up. How incredibly disrespectful! Or donors respond online and get nothing more than a bland autoresponder and a few generic, automated follow up emails.

Organizations spend a lot of their marketing budget on surveys that no one reads other than to find out if the respondent answered that all important “legacy gift intention” question (I’ve made a gift, I intend to, I would consider…). The rest are tossed aside. The questions are drafted for maximum response rather than to meaningfully engage.

I emailed our agency’s founder and chairperson, Mal Warwick, because I remembered him telling me he’d been using surveys in legacy giving for decades – he confirmed that he started using them more than 30 years ago (no, they weren’t invented by vendors in 2012). Of course, he’s one of the legends of the direct marketing world and a big proponent of legacy giving. He shared one of his surveys with me tonight.

I was struck by how similar and yet how different it was. It conveyed a respect for the donor, a desire to understand their concerns and opinions in a meaningful way, and evidenced a sincere interest in knowing what mattered most to the donor.

It wasn’t simply a pretext for sliding that “intention” question in. It wasn’t crafted for maximum response, although it did do amazingly well. It was created to encourage thoughtful, meaningful responses that could serve to deepen the relationship with the donor. And isn’t that the whole point?

And this, friends, is where we’ve gone wrong.

I have a whole presentation about why focusing on number of “considerers" (people who say they might consider a legacy gift) is not supported by research and how we make a whole lot of potentially unfounded assumptions about when and how and if these hand-raisers ever actually make a gift (slides on my profile), so I won’t go into that here.

But this issue of devaluing donors is reflected in other practices that are sadly widespread in the legacy giving world:

1)?????Pushing for documentation of legacy gifts – including gift value and a signature at the bottom (I might tattoo “REVOCABLE” on my forehead at some point because that doesn’t seem to sink in for many people). We seem to think that our desire to get this information overrides the donors’ right to not provide it. I’ve had people tell me that they’re more likely to get the gift if they require this. There is nothing that shows this to be true. Remember,?REVOCABLE.

2)?????Giving fundraisers “credit” only if they get that all-important documentation. Ugh, crediting policies are so corrosive.

3)?????Treating donors who have higher value bequest intentions as if their gift matters more than donors with smaller gifts. (I thought that every gift matters?)

4)?????Prioritizing short term engagement with various marketing campaigns (especially digital outreach) over the long-term communications work of letting donors know how important legacy gifts are, how much they matter, and how simple it can be. (Marketing automation is not the answer – we’re not selling cars).

5)?????Assuming that fundraisers/organizations have much more influence than they do over a donor’s decision to make a legacy gift. We’ve stopped focusing on what we CAN do and ignore the inconvenient fact that whether our organizations receive a gift has a lot more to do with the donor’s financial, family, and other circumstances than anything we do.

This year, I’m focused on getting back to the basics in many ways and centering relationships over short term ROI. I’m encouraging consistent legacy messaging rather than sporadic bursts of surveys or a random mailing here and there. I’m working on updating legacy propositions to better reflect the deep impact of these gifts rather than a generic expression of “helping future generations.” I’m reminding clients that the relationship drives the gift, and that everything we do should be with the relationship front and center.

Give your donors a call. Remind yourself that these are exceptional, lovely, generous people. Let their generosity of spirit inspire you to do better. Give me a call if you’d like to chat about how I can help.?

#legacies #giftsinwills #generosity