• About 7% of those surveyed plan to leave a bequest to a nonprofit organization.
• Of these, 73% have not created wills, but plan to within the next five years.
• Those who have decided to give and made a will tend to be in the highest household income group ($100K+) and generally have a college degree.
• Age 40-54 are more receptive to planned giving than older cohorts, but overwhelmingly have not made out a will.
• This age 40-54 is very high potential, largely neglected in bequest marketing.
• Once a nonprofit is named in a will, it is rarely removed.  By implication, getting named in the will of a 40-54 year old should lead to a bequest.  Just not for a while.
• A slim majority of those surveyed who plan to give to a nonprofit prefer not to declare that gift.  The biggest reason is that “it’s my business, no one else needs to know”.  (Relatively minor concerns: might change mind, doesn’t want to be pestered with appeals, doesn’t want nonprofit “waiting like a vulture” for gift, just makes donor uncomfortable.)
• As most nonprofits try to get donors to reveal a bequest, assuring privacy might better ensure bequests from many.  Another good idea: Assuring them that they can change their mind without permission, letting donor manage contacts.
• “We realize that circumstances change and your bequest to us may not be possible in the future.  Your family comes first.  You can change at any time.”
• Focus group shows donor interest in good stewardship, return on their investment.  Tell her you’ll keep her informed.
• The old shotgun appeal is not adequate.  Different age groups require distinct messaging on bequests.

• No, your best bequest donors are not the high-household income folks who make major gifts.  Bequests almost always come from people who’ve given often, in small amounts, and you haven’t heard from in a year or so.
• Profile of a bequest donor:  83 years old, widowed last year, no children or grandchildren.  Never gave more than $25, but gave at least twice a year for a decade.  Great predictor I hear: made gifts in 14 of the last 21 years.  But not 14 consecutive years.  A few people are crunching profiles here.
• Bequests donors have wealth.  Just not liquid wealth.
• Something like 96% of planned gifts are bequests, written into wills.  If you have extra time on your hands, pay attention to all those annuities and other fancy financial products.  If not: stick to bequests.
• Surveys are still a great way to fish for potential bequest donors.  But the first question should not be “are you remembering us in your will?” but instead “have you made out a will?” … “do you have a will?”  The majority of people die without wills, it seems.  If you have a donor who loves you, finding out that she hasn’t made out a will can be your entry point for offering help and getting a bequest.
• Yes, it’s important to get people to reveal their bequest, and highlight them in your newsletter.  New:  a page on your web site dedicated to bequests … bequest STORIES, that is.  Link to this from everything.  Even chapter web site.  The challenge:  keeping it fresh.  Someone has to pay attention.
• Anecdote:  At a gathering of good donors, declared bequest donors were given a special tag with the name of the “bequest society.”  Other donors saw this, asked, and many then inquired:  I want to remember XX in my will.  How do I arrange that?
• There are some very savvy consultants in the bequest field now.  Get the right one.

– More and more US organizations are enrolling donors in monthly giving programs, something long established in Canada, UK, Europe etc, late in the US due to different banking practices.

– Like getting any second gift, the best time to enroll donors in monthly giving is within 4 to 6 weeks after their first gift.

– Recency and frequency of giving are the key predictors for openness to monthly giving.  Not value (highest previous contribution).  Makes sense.

– Credit card giving is a strong predictor for monthly giving.  Also makes sense.  Thus online donors are good candidates.

– Phone is still the best channel to enroll in monthly giving.

– Street intercept monthly giving solicitation works well, but cost per enrolled donor is very high ($150) and donors tend to be young, with little capacity to give, high attrition.

– The best performing monthly giving mail solicitation asks only to enroll in monthly giving, without a fallback to “make a single gift today.”  That said, some orgs have controls with real strong monthly giving asks and a fallback only on the reply form.

– A $150 cost of acquisition of a monthly giving donor can be very satisfactory.   A $10 monthly gift covers that in a year and a half … an acceptable payback time given that monthly givers have high lifetime value.

]]> http://happydonors.com/?feed=rss2&p=644 0 http://happydonors.com/?p=641 http://happydonors.com/?p=641#comments Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:52:14 +0000 Dan http://happydonors.com/?p=641 I came across this useful article while mulling over a project where the client is asking for a strong emphasis on brand.

In” You’re Not Nike — Get Over It”, Jeff Brooks frames the issue very nicely:

“An effective nonprofit takes a different approach:  Instead of a look-at-me brand, it’s a look-at-you brand.”

Exactly.  He introduces this point with a discussion of the difference in “customer payoff” delivered with the transaction.  With iPhone, you get an iPhone.  With XXnonprofitXX, you get some satisfaction, feeling like you’re making something happen that you really want to happen.

So the “brand” doesn’t reside in the organization.  It’s in that experience.

We can argue that this is exactly the same for iPhone or Nike.  But they at least have a deliverable that makes a noise when you throw it against the wall.

Back to the client discussion, hoping the help them understand that this has got to be about the stories, not the PMS or the logo or the visuals that add a lot of cost to a communication but rarely deliver in additional donations … short term or long.

Here’s what I am proposing – a money back guarantee. Hey – if Sears can do it – you can do it.

If I give a donation to you – and you don’t THANK me, ACKNOWLEDGE my existence, TELL me how I’ve helped, treat me with a bit of RESPECT within – hmm – let’s say 30 days – I can ASK and GET my donation back.

Read his article.  If you scroll long enough you’d find my comment, now posted here:

– I don’t advocate donor-centered fundraising because it’s “right” … but instead because it’s smart. Poor cultivation is often the result of short-sightedness and/or inability to track lifetime value. Communications that don’t give you a decent net in the short run sometimes have big payoff long term.
– I’ve worked with a couple of political action groups that do give a money-back guarantee. These aren’t charities. The guarantee is for “membership dues” where “member” is used instead of “supporter” though they offer no more benefits than WWF, Sierra Club, Audubon, etc. The guarantees are prominent on page 4 of the letter and on the reply form. These guarantees have been tested. They lift response. And if ANYone asks for their money back, it’s rare and nothing compared to the response lift.

Enter your URL and this tool shows you what percentage of people see what areas of your web site when landing, based on statistics on browsers and what size people have the browser open to on their desktop.

For fundraisers, this is a way to quickly check whether your “donate” button is clearly visible to donors and potential donors when they land.

Beyond that, the overlay can reveal damage done by a committee approach to web design: you’ll see the results of too many stakeholders trying too hard to lay claim to real estate on the site.

Are supporters seeing what’s important to them? … or what’s important to your board?   Google Browsersize will give you a quick answer.  Check it out.

Overwhelmingly, organizations’ email approach is essentially mini-magazines, with lots of images (ideally captioned and clickable) and text topped with subheads and ending with “read more…”

The alternative is mini-letters. In a prior post, I try to make a case for further testing this now little-used approach. Here’s an additional slant on what we’re really doing in email…

In yet another earier post, I ask that you think of fundraising letters as an auditory, rather than written medium. Fundraising copywriters know this and write accordingly. It’s what works.

Direct marketing tests tell us what works but never why. I think it’s safe speculation to say auditory writing works because it simulates fact-to-face selling/fundraising.

Another factor is that, beyond all of our mail solicitiations, paper letters have largely been replace by telephone calls. Since, oh, 1940, people have transitioned away from letters into phone calls for most personal communication.

Some mistakenly think that email has replaces paper letters.

No. Email is replacing phone. And …

… an email communication is conceptually identical to making a phone call and leaving voice mail.

The good news: good fundraising copywriters have a conversational writing style in their DNA. When web and email were relayed from the tech folks to the direct mail copywriters, style went along.

The result? Almost all emails I receive from nonprofits read like conversation, whether they’re on minimag format or the rare text-only.

A good thing. And getting better.

While most info is directed to commercial marketers, 2,239 Tested Secrets for Direct Marketing Success is worth having in your library. It offers some strong tips specifically for fundraising. Plus most things that work for commercial sales have very useful applications for nonprofits involved in generating small gifts by mail.

I say that with confidence after reading that PIH gained tens of thousands of donors via online giving within a month after the disaster.  And I’ll wager that they have many thousands of “multis” (multi-gift donors) and more than a handful of pretty dedicated supporters thanks to fundraising efforts that do pretty much everything right.

Their emails have been informative, VERY emotionally compelling, and frequent enough to keep my attention.

They were appropriately focused on Haiti relief for quite some time.  Then a few days ago I received an email that demonstrates and excellent approach to moving a donor from an emergency cause to the organization’s broader mission.

First note that Partners In Health does not consider themselves an emergency relief organization.  They’ve said this on several occasions in their own communications, also picked up by relevant media.

They received wide attention after the Haiti disaster because they had plenty of people on the ground before the event.  Word got out.  Then they earned broad attention and respect for their remarkable relief efforts, including designation to run a key hospital early on.

So now, six months later, they’re still doing great work in Haiti, but they likely don’t want donations to continue to be focused strictly on Haiti, due to the limitations of designated use of funds, discussed in Happydonors some weeks ago.

Thus the email under discussion, which opens…

Dear Dan,

I write to you from Rwanda, where I have come for the first time since January’s devastating earthquake in Haiti. Many of us have been consumed by efforts there–efforts made possible by an outpouring of support for Haiti from partners new and old.

Ok, I’m already hooked into this transition, reminded of the reasons I supported this group for disaster relief…

When I arrived in Rwanda last week, I was very proud to see the PIH team working together with the Rwandan government, the Clinton Foundation, and thousands of people from the local community to put the finishing touches on what will soon be one of the largest hospitals in East Africa–a world-class teaching hospital that will offer (and teach) the high-quality care we believe all patients deserve.

Now I’ve been connected with full relevance and sympathy to Rwanda … same mission, different place, then to the broader mission worldwide…

In each of our eleven partner countries, projects like Butaro are realized by communities committed to working together to tackle the issues of poverty and disease. You are part of those communities. Just as in Haiti, the people we serve in Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, Peru, Siberia and elsewhere depend on your support of our global efforts.

The email continues (yes, it’s long!) with a compelling message that these other programs have been willingly sacrificing so that funds would be available for Haiti emergency relief.

Now it’s time to help THEM out.

Great messaging for the moment.   They merit the gift for that as well as their great work in the field.

An effective oddity: the subject line and donate button of the email urged me to “make a gift before June 30th”.  This is good marketing.  Putting any date forward creates some urgency, even when the date is not really a deadline, i.e., no negative consequences for missing that date.  On the actual donation site, I’m urged to make my gift before the end of their fiscal year on June 30.  Not a great reason for immediate action for a donor.  But no matter.  It was effective in the email itself, got me to the donation url.  Mission accomplished.

————————————————

P.S.  The gift acknowledgment email also addresses designated use of funds:

Your gift of $XX will help us further our mission of serving the poor in places that bear some of the heaviest burden of disease.

If you designated your gift for Haiti, your donation will help bring medical assistance and supplies to areas that have been hit the hardest and support long-term recovery efforts in Haiti.

I didn’t notice the option of designating a program on the donation site, so this may just be an all-purpose acknowledgment for gifts off this and other giving urls.

The “Bridge to Integrated Direct Marketing and Fundraising” conference is coming up on July 26-28.  This is the fourth year of a joint endeavor by the Association of Fundraising Professionals DC Metro Area Chapter (AFP/DC) and the Direct Marketing Association of Washington (DMAW),  again at the Gaylord in National Harbor.

This marriage started rocky.  The first year, it seemed like all the AFP people wanted was major giving/bequest sessions, while the speakers were largely small donor mail.  The DMAW folks are mixed fundraising and for-profit consumer or B2B.  Not enough overlap of content or audience that first year.  But things started to merge, meld and get MUCH better ever since.

Second year the fundraising middle ground got covered with strong sessions on cultivation … how to move donors up the giving ladder.  Plus more of the major gift people I met in subsequent years were sensitive to the fact that bequests most often come from the small-gift donor pool.

This year they’re offering plenty of tracks for all involved.  Check ‘em out if you can attend.

Big bonus for fundraisers:  I’m a fan of Michael Johnston, as I’ve written here before, and he’s doing a full-day pre-conference workshop. Attend if you can.  You won’t be disappointed.

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