10 Guiding Principles for Any Ask PART III

I’ve been sharing Laura Fredrick’s “The 10 Guiding Principles for Any Ask,” and have prompted you to consider them in your own fundraising efforts.  Laura’s principle for planned gift solicitations is an important one:   Any organization’s planned giving program must be coordinated with all other fundraising programs.

Was your first response to her statement an enthusiastic “Of course it must!”  Or, did you instead, ask yourself “Why?”

A planned gift, while sometimes considered confusing, is nothing more than a gift – a person’s last gift.  Most likely, it is the most thoughtful gift given and it has the potential to be the largest gift most donors will ever make.  As development professionals, we should see the progression from entry gift to loyal gifts, to larger gifts, to final gifts as a natural series of events.  When we do this, the promotion of planned gifts falls into place.

Planned gift marketing and cultivation messages easily follow cultivation for current gifts, campaign gifts and special project gifts.  When we coordinate planned giving messages with our other fundraising programs, we are extending our invitation to donors to be a part of the organization in perpetuity.  Isn’t that what we really want?

Take a few minutes to answer these questions and review your fundraising program messages:

• Are you focused on fundraising one-year-at-a-time?
• Does your fundraising plan also promote planned (or legacy) gifts?  If not, is it because you think you don’t know enough about planned gifts?
• Did you know that 90% to 95% of all planned gifts are a gift of cash in someone’s will or trust?
• Would you be more willing to promote planned gifts if you had some marketing examples to follow?

If you think you’re ready to make planned gift promotion a part of your fundraising program take a look at the marketing examples located at www.leavealegacy.org and read the Blackbaud white paper “How the Right Marketing Strategies Can Enhance Your Planned Giving Program” and you’ll be ready to take action.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katherine Swank, J.D.

Katherine has over 30 years of experience in the fundraising industry as a consultant, development officer and advancement team manager. As a member of Blackbaud’s analytics consulting team for over a decade, she facilitates strategic, client-facing content for Blackbaud’s custom modeling, wealth screening, and prospect research solutions to enhance clients’ development efforts with data-driven strategies.  Before assuming this role, she served as the national director of gift planning at
the National Multiple Sclerosis Society home office. Katherine has raised over $200 million during her career. She is a past president of the Colorado Planned Giving Roundtable, a former lawyer and also served as an affiliation faculty member at Regis University where she taught development-related courses at the master’s level for more than 10 years. She is a frequent speaker at BBCON, NACGP, Apra, AFP and other industry conferences.