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:

Want to Inspire More Donor Loyalty? Do What Marriott Does.

Marriott gets it. The nonprofit sector, not so much.

I’m talking about fostering loyalty.

Marriott has built the world’s largest hotel company, in part, by knowing how to cultivate a loyal customer base. By contrast, nonprofit organizations continue to hemorrhage donors, according to the 2016 Fundraising Effectiveness Survey Report from the Association of Fundraising Professionals and the Urban Institute.

To help you more effectively cultivate donor loyalty, I’m going to give you one excellent, easy to implement idea inspired by a recent email I received from Marriott:

Show your donors gratitude.

I know. I know. You already send your donors a thank-you letter when they make a gift. As a donor, I expect that, just like I’ve come to expect a thank-you email from Marriott following each of my stays.

Beyond that, I’m talking about surprising people with an unexpected message of gratitude.

A few days ago, I received an unanticipated email from Marriott. The subject line read: “Happy 24th Anniversary!”

I had no idea what the email was about, so I had to open it. When I did, I read:

Congratulations! Celebrate 24 Years with Marriott Rewards

Michael, we appreciate your loyalty and thank you for your membership!”

Yes, I know I’m a Marriott Rewards member. However, I did not realize that I’ve been a Marriott Rewards member for nearly a quarter-century. I enjoyed learning that. In addition, I appreciated being thanked for my overall loyalty, not simply for a recent stay.

Throughout the year, often in surprising ways, Marriott shows they appreciate my business. The fact that Marriott shows its appreciation is not the only reason the company is my preferred hotel company. There are many other factors. But, the fact that Marriott makes me feel valued is one important reason I value Marriott.

This Thanksgiving, send your donors an email, card, or letter expressing your appreciation. However, don’t simply thank them for their past support; thank them for caring about whatever your organization’s mission is. Also, thank them for their loyalty.

Avoid Making Faulty Assumptions about Donor Loyalty

Loyal supporters are valuable assets for every nonprofit organization.

Unfortunately, there is an alarming lack of understanding about the definition of “loyal supporter.” Before we address that issue, however, let’s look briefly at why loyal donors are so important.

Because it’s more cost-efficient to retain donors than acquire new ones, loyal donors allow charity fundraising programs to operate more efficiently. The lifetime value of such donors is greater. More money, more cost-effectively raised means more funds for mission fulfillment.

Interestingly, loyal donors also exhibit greater engagement tendencies as researchers Adrian Sargeant, PhD and Elaine Jay, PhD observed in their book Building Donor Loyalty:

Donors who remain loyal are also much more likely to engage with the organization in other ways. Long-term donors are significantly more likely than single-gift donors to offer additional gifts in response to emergency appeals, to volunteer, to upgrade their gift levels, to lobby for the organization, to actively seek out other donors on the organization’s behalf, to buy from a gift catalogue, and to promote the organization to friends and acquaintances.”

Sargeant and Jay even quantify the value of this additional activity. In their experience, they have seen that such activities can increase donor lifetime value by 150 to 200 percent.

Increasingly, charities are coming to appreciate the benefits of having loyal donors. For example, progressively more development professionals understand that loyal supporters make the best planned giving prospects.

This raises the question: Who is a “loyal supporter?”

In the context of planned gift marketing, one development professional recently defined loyalty as a combination of giving frequency, giving recency, and cumulative giving amount. I agree, but only to a point.

First, as Sargeant and Jay describe in their book, loyalty can be either passive or active. Passively loyal donors might give because their friends give, because they want to do something while they continue to search for the charity that is just right, or even because of inertia. By contrast, actively loyal donors care passionately about the organization and its mission. They identify with the values of the organization and regard donations to it as an essential, rather than discretionary, part of their personal budgets.

When it comes to fundraising, actively loyal donors are the only truly loyal donors. In other words, not all regular donors rise to the level of being loyal supporters.

Second, people can be loyal supporters without being donors. They even can be so intensely loyal that they make a generous legacy commitment.