Who are Your Best Planned Giving Prospects?

Almost everyone has the capacity to make a planned gift. Consider just these four facts:

• Among those ages 65 and older, 78 percent own their home (US Census)
• Most Americans own stock in one form or another (Gallup)
• Inflation-adjusted median household net worth grew 16 percent from 2013-16 (US Federal Reserve)
• 69 percent of Americans expect to leave an inheritance (Stelter)

The fact that most Americans have the ability to make a planned gift presents both a great opportunity and a profound challenge for fundraising professionals. With limited staff and budget resources, it is essential to focus legacy giving marketing where it will do the most good. So, who are the best planned giving prospects?

You can visualize the answer to that question as an equation:

Ability + Propensity + Social Capital = GIFT

Your best planned giving prospects will have the means with which to make a planned gift, ideally a sizeable one. However, just because they have the ability does not mean they will take the action you desire. A number of factors influence a prospect’s propensity for giving. Some of those factors might be related to the organization seeking a gift while other factors might have nothing to do with the organization. Finally, we need to consider a prospect’s level of social capital, their degree of engagement with the community and the organization. Someone who scores high in each category is more likely to make a planned gift than someone who scores low.

A simpler way to identify strong planned giving prospects is to recognize that “the most dominant factor in predicting charitable estate planning was not wealth, income, education, or even current giving or volunteering. By far, the dominant predictor of charitable estate planning was the absence of children,” according to philanthropy researcher Russell James, JD, PhD, CFP^®. In other words, people who do not have children are far more likely to make a charitable planned gift than those who have children.

However, while the absence of children tells us who is generally more likely to make a planned gift, it does not tell us whether your organization will be the recipient of such a gift. The leading factor that will determine whether someone will make a planned gift to your organization is their level of loyalty, according to legacy researcher Claire Routely, PhD.

As you attempt to determine a prospect’s level of loyalty to your organization, you’ll want to consider a number of factors including:

Free Webinar: 5 Easy, Powerful Tips to Boost Planned Giving Results

Is the current environment good or bad for planned giving? Should you invest more money in planned giving or current giving? What are five easy things you can do now to boost your planned giving results? In an upcoming, free webinar, I’ll answer these questions as well as inquiries from participants.

I’m honored that SEI Investments Management Corporation is hosting me for the free, 30-minute webinar: “Investing in Your Future: Practical Strategies for Growing Your Planned Giving Program.”

Planned giving is a vital source of contributions for the nonprofit sector. Organizations that don’t have a gift-planning program envy those that do — and those that do want even better results. While it can certainly present challenges, there are simple things you can do to create or enhance your organization’s gift-planning efforts. In just a 30 minutes, you’ll learn:

• 8 reasons you should be a planned giving “opportunist”
• Why you should invest more in planned giving instead of current giving
• 5 Tips to boost your planned giving results immediately

In addition, all participants will receive a complimentary selection of planned giving tools to help with strategy building.

Register today for this free webinar because the valuable information provided will help you meet your goals. After you register, think about the questions that you’d like to have me address during the live Q&A portion of the presentation.

Here are the details you need to know:

• “Investing in Your Future: Practical Strategies for Growing Your Planned Giving Program”
• Wednesday, March 27, 2019
• 2:00 – 2:30 PM (Eastern Daylight Time)

5 Tips You Need to Know to Survive Funding Volatility

It’s no secret that nonprofit organizations face funding challenges. One of the biggest challenges is volatility. Donors give and often do not renew support. Sometimes, that’s the fault of the charity. Other times, it has nothing to do with what a charity does or does not do. For example, funding from government sources, whether contracts or grants, can go up or down depending on political whims and changing priorities.

Recently, I was doing research for an article I was developing for the January issue of Advancing Philanthropy, the magazine published by the Association of Fundraising Professionals. While doing that, I identified five tips that can help all nonprofits better cope with funding volatility despite the fact that the article focuses on poverty-fighting charities.

Let me explain. As I wrote in my article:

Globally, poverty has been on a sharp, steady decline. ‘In 1990, 37 percent of humanity lived in what the World Bank defines as extreme poverty; today that number is 10 percent,’ writes Gregg Easterbrook, author of It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear. Yet, even given that good news, nearly one billion people continue to suffer in extreme poverty around the world.

In the United States, poverty has also been on the decline while individual purchasing power has been on the rise. For example, ‘On the first day of the twentieth century, the typical American household spent 59 percent of funds on food and clothing. By the first day of the twenty-first century, that share had shrunk to 21 percent,’ Easterbrook reports. ‘US poverty has declined 40 percent in the past half-century.’ Still, despite the enormous economic progress, poverty continues to darken the lives of millions of our fellow citizens.”

While charities continue their efforts to combat poverty and its effects, government funding is becoming increasingly unreliable. With the national debt over $22 trillion and climbing, the federal government is contemplating cutbacks. Already, some state governments have been cutting back funding to charities.

Here are five tips that poverty-fighting charities are embracing that all charities would be wise to also adopt: