In the two decades 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.

HOW we promote legacy gifts is the 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 with no budget or extra staffing?” The answers are predicable: Print a brochure. Put an ad in your newsletters and other publications. Send a “bequest appeal.” 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. This marketing is passive. It’s transactional. Rather than encourage two-way conversation with your donors, you’re just waiting for them to raise their hands – and why should they?

Donors want to feel connected to your organization – but they don’t want to feel that they’ve gotten on a development officer's radar to be solicited for bigger gifts. They don’t picture themselves teetering on the very peak of the traditional donor pyramid where we would like to place them. They are being bombarded by a tsunami of generic planned giving mail that uses all the wrong words.

If you are directing a planned giving program and don’t embrace your role as a marketer – or donor engagement specialist, if you will - your program will fail.

We don’t want to talk about the “marketing” word. Go to any planned giving conference and there are panels on obscure gifts like lead trusts; in-depth discussions of estate planning techniques; complex donor fact patterns to dissect. Marketing isn’t a priority. That’s not “real” planned giving. “Real” planned giving is closing a gift of complex assets with a major donor. Organizations that receive most of their planned gift revenue from realized bequests are dismissed as mere “bequest shops.”

But – what is the goal? To engage donors in our mission, inspire them, and maximize dollars for our organization. For most of us, where is the money coming from? Gifts through wills, trust and beneficiary designations. This may not be the case at some organizations. But I’ve spent much of my career in progressive advocacy, and at these organizations – some of which are booking $30 million or more in realized bequests each year – 90+% of ultimate dollars realized come from bequests.

So as the director of your organization’s planned giving program (or the person responsible for legacy gifts), how should you spend your time? I would suggest you focus on developing good engagement-driven marketing strategies and advocating for resources to implement them.

Wait a minute, you protest. Shouldn’t I be spending most of my time out of the office meeting with donors? Probably not.

The conventional wisdom is that visits are the best way to solicit and close planned gifts (for the purpose of this discussion, let’s limit the planned gifts to bequests and maybe CGAs). While we should engage in a meaningful way with our donors, I haven’t heard of any actual data-driven research that supports the idea that qualifying donors and soliciting legacy gifts in person works best. In fact, Russell James has found that in-person solicitation is pretty low on the list of favorite ways donors like to be solicited for a legacy gift. 

(Let’s stipulate that major/leadership level donors are an entirely different story.)

But take a look at your “traditional” planned giving donor: longtime loyal donor, maybe at the membership level, maybe at a more robust mid-level, but not a donor who sees herself as a major donor. Hopefully no grandkids! On paper, she or he looks like a fabulous planned giving prospect. But is she really? How about a visit to find out? You've never actually spoken to her, but you're sure she'd love to meet with you to chat about estate planning.

Here’s a news flash – they don’t want to meet. At least not until you’ve done a good job engaging them, getting to know them, learning enough about them to be able to speak to their needs, values, and goals. Even then, maybe they still won't want to meet. And they really don’t want to talk about taxes and death.

If you’re going to spend a majority of your time in front of donors, don’t you think you’d rather start with the ones who actually want that type of engagement and are also likely to make a planned gift? Or who already have made a gift and need stewarding, so you don't lose them? And how do you know that they want that kind of personal relationship? You could pull your list of long-time donors and start calling down the list. With enough calls and persistence, you might be able to line up a bunch of visits. But are they the right visits with the right donors? Probably not. 

Or, you could do the marketing that will help you efficiently identify the donors who WANT a relationship with your organization; figure out (maybe by asking them?) the KIND of relationship they want; and use that information to spark their interest in a legacy gift. You could do the kind of marketing that encourages donors to disclose their existing gifts, so you can include them in the stewardship necessary to ensure that you STAY in their plans. 

It all starts with (good) marketing.  

Tracy Malloy-Curtis is a 20-year veteran in legacy giving and major gifts fundraising for advocacy and social justice organizations nationwide. She leads the legacy giving practice at MWD.