Marketing

We define it as any major gift, made in lifetime or at death as part of a donor's overall financial and/or estate planning.  By contrast, gifts to the annual fund or for membership dues are made from a donor's discretionary income, and while they may be budgeted for, they are not planned.

(Our handy Planned Giving Pocket Guide describes all planned gifts.)

What is the number one reason people donate to charity?

Because they are asked to give. The other four reasons:

• Compassion for those in need
• They personally believe in the cause
• They are affected by the cause
• To give back to their community.

Research data shows that 43% of charitable bequests and 35% of charitable remainder trusts are created by individuals age 55 or younger.  Don't let the average age of your prospects be a principal determinant in whether or not you will market planned gifts. 

Too young for planned giving?  How about: old enough to plan for the future.

(Here is a slide show of interesting planned giving myths that we uncover.)

The average time from inception to maturity for a planned gift is 7-10 years - only a few years longer than most campaign pledge periods.  And remember, the typical planned giving target is 200 times a donor's largest annual fund gift.

Do the math yourself:                 

The typical capital gift target is 20 times a donor's largest annual fund gift.  The typical completed planned gift is 200 times a donor's largest annual fund gift. Your planned giving pool may be as much as 5 times larger than your capital pool.

(Here is a slide show of interesting planned giving myths that we uncover.)

Focus on features, and you're selling how planned gifts work.  It's like detailing how many cylinders a car has instead of how much the client would enjoy driving it (benefits).  We believe in focusing the prospect's attention on benefits - in selling the sizzle (benefits), not the steak.

And one of our colleagues contends that if you're selling the features of planned gifts, you're promoting death!  (The primary feature of a planned gift in the prospect's mind?  "As soon as I die, they get my money!")

The Internet engages visitors to explore, linger and learn in a way that print materials cannot match.  So  when prospects visit your planned giving site, they've come to you on their own time, receptive to learning about creative ways to support you.  That's the opposite of the direct-mail experience.

The Web has also become our acknowledged source of information: Tax forms?  The hours at the Museum? Directions to Peoria? Get it online.  For many baby boomers, the rising generation of planned gift prospects, if the information they are looking for does not exist online, it does not exist, period.  As your prospects become increasingly Web-proficient, you need to take advantage of the medium that will communicate with them best.

Prompts from an organization's overall website should be one of the best sources of visitors to the planned giving pages, but it's the weakest link (excuse the pun) at many non-profits.  Prospects already thinking about the organization have a hard time finding out how they can support it.

The solution?

• 1 Develop a custom, human-friendly URL and promote it yourself.
• 2 Work closely with your colleagues in IT to create logical links from the main site to planned giving.

Regarding #1 above, most people will not click on, for example:

"give > advancement > planned giving" 

(in fact, most people do not even know what "advancement" stands for - it's like saying "foundation" - we're all using words that only we understand!).

You have an easily remembered URL, and you're promoting it?  Good.  Now, ask for/insist on/bribe your webmaster for a link on the your organization's home page, plus any pages that tell visitors about the good work that your organization is doing, that says something like "Creative Ways to Support Us" and leads to your gift pages.  Throughout your institution's website, find interesting stories about new projects or memorable events.  Work on embedding a line or two within those stories that hyperlink to planned giving.  For example, "You can help support this new research endowment with a gift that costs nothing during your lifetime." (links to giving through a will).   If you need some planned giving "one-liners" you can get them here for free.

Domain registration services are a commodity.  Just Google the terms "domain registration" and you will have plenty of choices.  Popular ones are GoDaddy.Com, NetworkSolutions.Com, 1and1.Com among many.

Here is a hint or reality check: If you, yourself, have even the slightest difficulty in using a PG calculator, your prospect will not be able to use it at all. We don't take a position on the question, but we do know that confusing and poorly designed calculators will frustrate and turn off prospects. 

The obvious "pro" of a typical online calculator is that it makes the financial benefits of a gift plan more tangible to prospects, and thus can engage prospects in the gift process more deeply. Here are some of the "cons":

• They get very little use.
• Donors who use them may end up finalizing gift plans without talking to you.
• A donor can easily choose the wrong gift plan to calculate.
• Calculators cover standard life-income arrangements, but most do not cover more complex transfers, including: IRAs, life insurance, etc.
• What if a donor calculates a high payout rate and becomes disappointed when your organization can't offer it?

One calculator we recommend is PG Calc. You may also wish to consider VirtualGiving's consumer-based calculators that help prospects better understand their own personal financial planning - thus making clear how a gift will fit into that planning, as well as encouraging them to revisit your website for their personal use. We feel they are a great value-added item. 

Never simply announce that you have a new planned giving website.  No one will care.

Instead, wrap news about your website into a larger fundraising message. Here's a good letter you can download at minimal cost. It thanks your prospects for past support, and encourages them to explore ways to give that benefit their and their family's welfare while also benefitting your organization. It then directs them to your planned giving website, where they can learn more. 

We think you should send that letter out several times a year.  There's something called the "stickiness factor" in consistent direct mail.  Remember that fewer than a third of your letters will be read, and that fewer than 5% of the people who did read the letter will remember what it said 4 months after receiving it.  So send the same letter again - don't reinvent the wheel (or, even worse, send out one marketing piece and then drop the campaign).

Hits: Any files requested from the server (including files that are graphics and scripts).  The word "hits" actually refers to the total number of files that are requested from the server. Therefore the number of hits to a site is always going to be significantly higher than the actual number of visits to the site. This is because a typical visit to a website will include "hits" on a number of pages. Not only is each page counted as a hit, but all the graphics and scripts on every page requested are also counted. Given the number of graphics on a typical webpage, the difference between hits and visits is substantial. It would not be uncommon for a traffic report to show ten or even twenty times as many hits as actual visits.

Pages: Also known as a web page, a page is defined as a single file on a web server. For example, a page could be an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) document, an image, a java applet, a CGI script, etc. Any file that is neither a gif nor a jpeg is considered a page.

Unique Visitor: A unique visitor is an IP address that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during the current period shown by the report. If this host makes several visits during this period, it is still counted only once. The period shown by Urchin reports is, by default, the current month.  

Visits: Number of visits made by all visitors. Think "session" here -- say a unique IP accesses a page and then requests three others without an hour between any of the requests, then all of the "pages" are included in the one visit.  You should expect multiple pages per visit and multiple visits per unique visitor (assuming that some of the unique IPs are logged with more than an hour between requests).

To whom?  According to marketing guru Dan Kennedy, "A funny thing usually happens in the advertising business ¾ a client will cancel or change an ad campaign that's working perfectly well just because they got bored with it and assumed everybody else was, too. That's a bad assumption. There are ad campaigns that sustain success for five, even ten years. These campaigns are old hat to their owners but are new to new customers who are paying attention to them for the first time. If it's unknown to someone, it's a secret — regardless of how routine it may be to you."

This especially applies to planned giving, since your prospects will visit your website over a period of a few days before contacting you and not month after month. Remember, the site will always look fresh because it is a one-time visit.

Before you press the "send" key, stop and think. You can alienate your prospects really easily that way.

Ready for a quick quiz? Consider the cost of non-responders. A fundraiser sends the same blast email to a prospect list of 10,000 prospects at a total cost of $1000 (a print version could easily cost $5,000). Assuming a 2% response rate (200 people) and a $100 gift per response, she raises $20,000 (200 x $100).  That's a 20-times ROI (return on investment).

If you said "Congratulations!" then you're probably operating under the old rules of email marketing, which is what most people do and why most fail.

But non-response is not free.

Prospects create value for a non-profit in two ways:

• 1. Contributing today.
• 2. Increasing their intent to contribute in the future.

When the fundraiser sent the email campaign above, she sent it to 9,800 prospects who had no interest in the "offer." What if the email was perceived as spam by a number of high-value and high-potential prospects -- as an intrusion to their inbox (whether consciously or unconsciously)? If even a fraction of these annoyed non-responders decide to contribute less in the future, the loss in prospect value and profits far outweighs the short-term benefits the fundraiser received from the promotion.

Worse yet, some non-profits, at the advice of vendors or consultants who do not research as meticulously as we do, send such emails on a weekly basis, and see only declining returns.

Clear, relevant and timely emails not only help boost short-term returns today, but they also enhance the lifetime giving potential of current and future prospects and donors.  So you should focus not on ROI, but rather ROP - Return On Prospect.   This perspective provides you with a more balanced picture of your email campaigns.

ROP measures the prospect value that's created or destroyed, which allows for a more accurate gauge of the long-term effect of mass email campaigns.

Because fewer and fewer are even getting read. 

Marketing noise: every day the average prospect is inundated with over 2500 marketing messages. In a large city, it's over 3700.  A battle is being fought for the eyes and ears of the world, and in most cases your enemy is an overstuffed mailbox.  Not only is your mail competing with the Legacy Newsletter of the hospital next door, but your prospects' mailboxes are full of so much junk that your newsletter is often simply lost in the pile.  And admit it: many issues you mail out are not exactly compelling reads.  Come on. Do you really believe your prospects are dying to get home at night to read your "exciting" newsletter describing how to part with their wealth after death?

They will actually pay more attention to an advertising medium that delivers a quick, simple, focused message.  One that is cleverly designed, cleverly delivered, and most especially one that is benefits-based. These can include postards and solicitation letters. (Important: if you send out solicitation letters, do not enclose any other pieces in the envelope. They detract from the message.)

Remember: Americans read their mail standing over a wastebasket.

Depending on the type of organization sending them, planned giving newsletters in general have less than a 5% readership (not response) rate. If you are a boutique non-profit your readership rate may be higher, but do your homework.  No matter what kind of non-profit you represent, however, expect to encounter the trend of more and more of your newsletters being trashed before they are even opened.

Correct and that is our point.

You should never focus on the details or features of planned gifts in any marketing medium! Sell the sizzle (a gift's benefits), not the steak. 

The vendor's reasoning goes back to the 60's — the Old Days of planned giving.

We hear it all too frequently; "I don't want to mail my prospects too often because I may annoy them."  If you are that sensitive, perhaps you should not ask them for donations at all.  Take a fundraising powerhouse like St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital for example; do you think they worry about how often they mail?  And, like other successful charities, they do mail often. 

Here is an amusing story:

"I sometimes eat breakfast at a little, neighborhood mom-and-pop coffee shop near my home.  There on the counter next to the cash register sit three different receptacles for charitable donations of coins ¾ one for Kiwanis, one for some organization for the blind, one for disabled veterans.  One morning, as I dropped my change into one of the receptacles, it registered with me that I always plunked my change into the same one.  Why?  I stood there for a few minutes pondering my own behavior.

Then it hit me.  The reason I always put my change into the disabled veterans jar was

• NOT because I had preference for that charity over the others
• NOT because of any reasoned decision to support it instead of the others
• NOT because of the graphic design or appearance of the containers
• NOT because of any sales copy on the containers
• NOT because of their arrangement on the counter
• NOT for any logical or admirable reason

The reason, and only reason, I put all my change into only one of these charity jars, each and every time, is because the hole in the top of my favored jar is bigger than the holes in the lids on the other two jars."

Lesson learned?  Ask steadily, ask obviously, and ask for more.

In this discussion we assume that the mailing is not going out late and does not have a deadline for response.  In those cases use First Class or do not mail at all.

Most times, "Third Class Mail" (the US Postal service often changes the name of this service; but it's the generally recognized "bulk mail") works just as well as first class mail, and using the non-profit, pre-canceled postage results in substantial cost savings.

Non-profits who try to gauge mail to arrive and be read a certain day of the week are kidding themselves. Not only does it depend on the different post-offices your mailing is routed through, but many people don't read mail daily because they are either not at home or have other priorities. With proper planning you can control the arrival of Third Class Mail within 10 days in the US (except during the Christmas season).

One of the reasons non-profits new to direct marketing shy away from Third Class is that they feel their mailers will be perceived as junk mail. This is a misconception because junk mail is only junk if it has no appeal to the reader (like most of the spam out there).  A well written and well produced mailing that tells your organization's story will appeal to many of your prospects.

If you are sending out a personalized letter, we generally recommend first class mail (with a real stamp, and preferably a handwritten or typed address.  You may also want to consider writing "first class mail" on the envelope.  Of course, your size of mailing and budget may impose limitations, but many of your planned giving mailings will be going to a small, targeted group. 

Depends upon your budget and staff resources. 

If you develop one, do not invest too much time and money in it, and use the finished product more as a leave behind than a direct-mail piece.  Avoid overly expensive 4- to 6- color pieces (unless budget is not an issue).  Many non-profits are finding that it creates a better impression on prospects for the fundraiser to print out appropriate pages from the planned giving website, enclose them in a folder along with a personalized gift illustration request, and deliver this package in person (if possible), rather than to mail a mega-buck glossy brochure.

Focus on the relevance and quality of your message in your brochure, and leave the high production values to the banks and investment houses.

Our advice?  Do not include any numeric scenario.  A $10K gift example will implant (even subconsciously) in your prospects' minds that that's the amount they should donate.  Describe your mission and vision, show how a gift annuity can help a donor support that vision, and then follow up with a personalized gift example for each respondent.

They're a must.  There's no way we can over-emphasize this.  We always tell our clients the most important thing is visits. Everything we do is designed to get you in front of more prospects. We can come up with the coolest marketing stuff but if our clients aren't visiting their prospects, the cool ideas are meaningless.

Some planned giving officers make few visits because their institutions are successfully raising a lot of money. We call them DNPs - Do Nothing People. Yes, their institutions are raising planned gifts, but only due to the size of their constituency and the momentum of the institution.

Unfortunately, with DNP fundraisers, they are also leaving a lot of gifts on the table.

At the end of your email is your signature line. Develop a set of 5 signature lines and use the appropriate one depending whom you are writing to.  For example, if you know that your prospect owns appreciated securities, below your signature you may add, "Did you know giving stock could be more beneficial than giving cash?"*  Better yet, have this hyperlink to your website's page on Appreciate Securities.

Avoid vague blurbs like "Our Foundation's Goal is to Support Our Institution." First, most people don't even know what a foundation is (a lady we know thought is was part of the building's basement); second, it's too generic to get a point across.  Even stay away from words like "bequest" - most do not know what it is.

Here are some promotional one-liners you can use.

[* See our Stock Calculator]

First, good luck.  All the convincing in the world isn't going to make your boss smack his forehead early one morning and cry, "I get it!  I get it!  Let me google unitrusts and discover the wonderful world of planned giving!"

Joking aside, here's a great link.  At the end, you can request a Power Point version. (91% of those who've heard the presentation have given it this presentation a 5-rating; some professional advisors use it in their seminars.)

For a professional (to convince your board) presentation titled Get Your Board on Board, click here.