Marketing: Electronic

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 planned giving 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":

• 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.
• What if a donor calculates a high payout rate and becomes disappointed when your organization can't offer it?

Solution? Make sure to have a good disclaimer! Plus, make sure to use the best online planned giving calculators on this planet.

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.

Donor stories motivate others to give, and generate second-time gifts. Imagine the impact of a simple, sincere story about a donor who was able to make the gift she had always wanted because the payments from her gift annuity more than replaced the dividends from the stock she donated!  A real-life story demonstrates the effectiveness of planned giving in ways that technical gift detail never can.

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]