5 Ways to Grow Your Planned Gifts

Growing your planned-giving program isn’t just about tomorrow — it can also strengthen fundraising today. Bequests hit $45.8 billion last year, and with markets at record highs, donors with investments may have more to give than ever. 

Cultivating a legacy mindset deepens loyalty and boosts revenue. Often current gifts rise, too, when donors commit to a future bequest.

“If a donor makes a planned gift commitment to the organization and they’re stewarded, their current giving will actually go up,” says Andrew Fussner, national vice president of estate settlement at the American Heart Association. “You’re going to increase overall giving by doing that.”

The Chronicle spoke to Fussner and two other experts about how to maximize the results of your planned-giving strategy. Here’s what they say is working.

Use email and direct mail to yield new leads.

While direct mail has historically been the most reliable way of reaching potential legacy donors, digital campaigns have made up a lot of lost ground.

“Yes, direct mail still matters. You definitely still want to do it,” says Meg Roberts, a seasoned fundraiser who has specialized in planned giving for 25 years. But even if you don’t have the budget for a big direct-mail campaign, “don’t let that stop you, because emails are doing really well — especially digital surveys or other things that you can do pretty inexpensively to reach a broader group.”

Send a survey out, ask eight to 10 questions, and have one of them be about planned giving. You’ll get some leads out of that one question.

Online outreach could feature, for example, a campaign to expand your legacy society or a gift-matching opportunity, she says: “Any time there is some sort of marketing tool that you can leverage to create urgency, that helps. Most of the time, unless you’ve just gone through a pandemic, there is no urgency to update estate plans.”

Melissa McElvain, director of planned giving at the ALS Association, says the best way to generate leads is to ask donors directly as part of a larger request for feedback.

“I’m a big fan of a survey,” she says. “Send a survey out, ask eight to 10 questions, and have one of them be about planned giving. You’ll get some leads out of that one question.”

Ask legacy donors for unrestricted support today.

A bequest signals the depth of a donor’s trust in the way a charity carries out its mission — the same trust fundraisers seek when asking for general operating support, says Roberts. “A lot of planned-giving donors prefer that their gifts be unrestricted because they care so much about the organization as a whole.”

That means legacy donors make excellent prospects for major or unrestricted gifts in the present. Research from Russell James, professor of charitable financial planning at Texas Tech University, found that average annual gifts rose from $4,210 to $7,381 after donors pledged an estate gift — a 75 percent increase.

Average annual gifts rose from $4,210 to $7,381 after donors pledged an estate gift — a 75 percent increase.

Roberts tells planned-gift donors that giving today is the best way to see how the organization uses their money during their lifetimes.

In her role as senior director of development at the ALS Association, “I point out the fact that, you know, we’re so grateful for what they’ve done [for] the future and I know they’re really committed to what’s happening right now,” says Roberts. “Would they like to see this start now so that they can really see what it does?”

Explore new tech tools to track bequests.

Most charities don’t take the time to review whether mature bequests equal their pledges, Fussner says, “so they have no idea how many of those commitments are failing.” He says it’s common for fundraisers to critically underestimate the failure rate of gift commitments, which can be as high as 60 percent, according to research from Russell James.

However, using a customer-relationship management system keeps your data clear. 

“If you have all your gift commitments in a CRM and you have your bequest in there, it’s much, much easier to match them up,” Fussner says.

There are now a variety of software options that can help gift officers keep better records about the status of bequests.

In November, Trust & Will released its Nonprofit Platform to guide estate planning and donor engagement for charities. The tool is built on EstateOS, a platform also used by banks and financial advisers, and includes AI-powered analysis to shape strategy around planned giving.

The American Heart Association is in the process of integrating its internal planned-giving data into Salesforce CRM, Fussner reports. For small and midsize charities, he says PG Calc’s Bequest Manager is a suitable database solution for case management.

Unlock the full value of estate gifts.

When talking to donors about their estate planning, McElvain recommends that they name family members in their wills but designate charities as beneficiaries on their financial accounts to save on taxes, paperwork, and time. 

“I love when donors include us as a beneficiary of their retirement account because 100 percent of their funds go to the charity. There’s less money going to Uncle Sam,” she says. 

Roberts notes that asking for a beneficiary designation instead of being added to a will or trust streamlines the payout and also broadens the pool of donors. 

I love when donors include us as a beneficiary of their retirement account because 100 percent of their funds go to the charity. There’s less money going to Uncle Sam.

“Less than 50 percent of the population has a will, but many people have retirement accounts at this point in time because we moved away from the pension,” she says. “They now have more IRAs and other kinds of retirement accounts, and those [beneficiary designations] are really easy to change.” Beneficiary information can be updated online in minutes, she says.

Not all gifts are so simple, however. With bequests of more complicated assets, find a way to capture the full value, says McElvain.

For example, a donor in California left the ALS Association the contents of his home, including his collection of rare guitars. Coincidentally, the charity was planning a music-themed gala in Nashville, so the instruments were appraised and shipped across the country. There, the guitars brought in more than $100,000 at auction – exceeding what they would have received through other means of liquidation.

“This was a donor who saw the value in these guitars, and they meant something to him,” says Roberts. “They didn’t just go to a pawn shop or an estate auction. We were able to facilitate it going to somebody else who also loves them and appreciates them in that same way and understands the value of them.”

Ensure all your planned gifts cross the finish line.

Once you’ve done the hard work to secure estate gifts, you don’t want to let any fall through the cracks. Whatever you do, Fussner says, don’t let a planned gift slip away because of a lack of oversight.

Charities should have one full-time employee dedicated to estate settlement for every 250 bequests received per year, he advises. Nonprofits that handle fewer than that can outsource the work to a law firm, as needed. He says the American Heart Association receives 750 to 850 bequests a year and has four full-time employees to oversee estate settlement. 

Don’t let a planned gift slip away because of a lack of oversight.

Early in his time at the organization, Fussner discovered a pledge from a donor who had died more than five years before, but the estate had not distributed the bequest or offered an explanation for the delay. A single phone call to the trust officer resolved the problem, and a six-figure check arrived days later.

The vast majority of estates are settled without a problem, he says, “but it’s that little bucket that doesn’t, and you don’t know which ones are going to be in that bucket until you start following up with all of them. We don’t spend a ton of money on bequest administration, but we make it back just on the margins.”