Fundraising report their gifts can make, and they want communications to be relevant and authentic. There is a big opportunity to connect with supporters differently and meet their needs in a different way by truly giving donors what they want in order to engage in a deeper way with your organization. This will also allow for it to be delivered to more supporters than is possible using major gift strategies of one on one personal solicitation. It sounds easy, but clearly, it’s not. The truth is you can do more for the success of long-term legacy revenue by creating great experiences now for your core donors: annual, tribute, mid-level and monthly all included! Engagement challenges We’re finding that organizations are struggling to see the opportunities to shift to a wider engagement of supporters using legacy giving as a driver for long-term relationships. Here are four examples. First, there is managing cause and effect. Legacy giving is in many ways a long-term high-value relationship program and because the income is long-term, people don’t understand or trust the relationship levers that can influence giving in the future. But we need to take action today that will create connections and long-term engagement. In short: we are not investing enough now. Second, we are measuring legacies in a way that often only focuses value on confirmed expectancies, which is just not the only way legacy outcomes are driven. We need to shift our focus to hand-raisers (that group of people who ask for more information, say they will be interested in the future, look information up or ask a question on wording) who are key to our success. These people need to be highly valued and we need to measure their value differently in order to influence investment.
“We need to use legacy marketing to engage people...” Third, many donors who we nudge, excite and inform will never tell us we are in their wills until we receive a gift. Your own metrics support this reality. Some of our organizations have up to 90percent of actual fulfilled legacy gifts that come from people who are either not on file at all OR who are on the database as a donor, but who have not told them about the gift in the will (the lowest we have seen is 63percent and that is exceptional). Last, and perhaps most important, we are not recognizing the incredible opportunity to use legacy fundraising and engagement to bridge between general awareness and direct response marketing. We need to use legacy marketing to engage foundationmag.ca
people, align with their values and build a lifetime of giving, which is something very special and enduring. It’s something major gift fundraisers have been doing forever: but we need to do it with greater numbers of people. Real growth opportunities We have the opportunity to do all of this and more while realizing immense growth in our organizations but not with old thinking, old measurements and old strategies. We need organization-wide involvement and leadership, full integration of the legacies into everything we do, and we need brave creators and innovators. In fact, we can see a world where legacies can lead on the relationship connections, not follow, and we need people to understand what truly drives their donors and turn everything they do to that. Some people make trends. Some follow. Some miss them completely. Some don’t care. We believe that legacies, long-term relationships and great experiences are the trend that we can put fuel in and take to another level. It’s going to take brave new approaches to realize the potential. And we couldn’t be more excited to be on this journey. What about you? Kimberley Blease is Executive Vice President of Blakely.
@EASE is the focal point of all fundraising activity. It has been designed to bring together a complete collection of data and resources used by FD staff. Donors, prospects, advocates, professionals, media…everyone important to telling your story, donating or speaking on behalf of the charity become its community as defined and recorded in @EASE. Cloud or Installed Solutions
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RaiseFundsWithEase.GURU November/December 2019
FOUNDATION Magazine
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