Things to know if you haven’t yet delved into this tricky
fundraising medium.
By Jim Hussey

The concept of planned giving is nothing new — churches began the process many years ago — but too many nonprofit organizations don’t have sufficiently organized planned-giving programs. If you're one of them, here’s something of a primer.

Planned giving is a generic name for fundraising programs that seek to generate giving from supporters in their later years who will continue to give once they’ve passed away - in the form of estate gifts and other charitable vehicles. It’s the best long-term resource in which a nonprofit organization can invest.

A relatively small amount of money invested now to conduct some basic marketing and education concerning planned giving will result in a windfall for your organization in five to 10 years, All you need is a little bit of skill and a lot of patience.

Different vehicles
The most common forms of planned gifts are bequests, in which a supporter sets aside money for the nonprofit organization in her will or insurance policy. Other bequests can include the donation of land or stocks. You can promote the concept of bequests through mediums as simple as ads in your newsletters and other publications, or as complex as multifaceted marketing campaigns that use direct mail and personal contact. You don’t have to wait for a donor to die before gaming her support through planned giving. As a matter of fact, the cultivation process has to begin well in advance.

Other options include annuities. Annuities involve the donation of a set sum of money by a living donor to an organization, which then pays the donor a specific amount of interest every month during the remainder of her lifetime. When the donor dies, the organization keeps the balance of the money.

Annuities are great because they can help both the organization and the donor.

While the organization benefits from the donation, the donor also benefits by receiving revenue for the remainder of her life. The older the donor, the higher her return rate. So a 90-year-old donor will receive a much higher return rate than a 70-year-old donor.

How to do it
Many organizations work through consultants who specialize in planned giving to develop their campaigns and related materials. The consultants provide readily available knowledge and marketing materials that require little effort on the part of the nonprofit organization.

Other organizations, chiefly larger groups, rely on focus groups to develop their own materials. Focus groups usually aren’t very effective in gauging direct-marketing response. It’s normally cheaper and more effective to test direct-mail packages by simply mailing them to small test cores.

But you don’t have that advantage with planned-giving materials - it could be years, or even decades, before a “test” donor passes away and leaves your organization a gift. Only then would you be able to judge the effectiveness of your marketing materials. That’s why focus groups have proven to be a valuable tool in helping to develop effective planned-giving campaigns.

Correctly targeting potential planned-gift supporters is a tricky business, and you need to work closely with your consultant to develop the right mix of materials targeted to the right mix of recipients. Demographic factors such as age, gender, length of home ownership and the value of the primary residence often are important elements to examine.

Amazingly, the amount of a donor’s previous donations often is not a reliable indication of her ability and inclination to donate through planned giving. I've seen many instances in which donors who have given only $20 or $25 to a nonprofit organization during their lifetime leave hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars to that organization at their death.

Does your organization have planned giving? 

There’s little we can do about it, so why talk so much about age?
By Jim Hussey

No other donor demographic is more over-discussed and overrated than age.

As fundraisers, we’re obsessed with our donors’ average ages, even though there's little we can do to push this figure up or down.

I wish I had a dime for every time inexperienced or would-be clients blanched when they learned their donors’ average ages, which usually is in the 60s or sometimes even higher. They fear their current donors soon will die off.

Before they panic and begin posting their resumes, I explain to them that charitable giving is dominated by older donors. And as one generation passes on, it's replaced by the next.

Here’s an example I use to demonstrate this trend. I've been affiliated with one organization for almost 18 years, so it provides a good example of how a donor base is affected over time. When I first began work with this group, the average donor’s age was around 66. Today, it’s still in the same ballpark.

In the past 20 years, many of those original donors, maybe even the majority, certainly have died. But they've been replaced by others who've aged and moved into this donor age bracket.

Why are most donors older? Are younger people less committed to charitable causes? Absolutely not. Younger people are just as committed; they just express it in different ways. Older donors typically have more expendable income, while younger philanthropists are more likely to volunteer their services than their cash.

An example of this is Habitat for Humanity, which partners with needy families to build their own homes. The average age of volunteers who work at a building site is less than the average age of typical direct-mail donors who financially support the organization.

But there’s more
Fear of a dying donor base isn’t the only issue of concern to nonprofit organizations. In this age-phobic time when commercial marketers often favor younger consumers, some fundraisers try to exclude older supporters by aiming for younger donor bases.

I hear them say recruitment efforts should be targeted toward younger donors, to help bridge the age gap. In the end, most of these efforts quickly fail for financial reasons. That’s because most such strategies are akin to Apple Computer Inc. spending more of its iPod advertising budget on 80-year-old prospects, since they account for such a small segment of the MP3 player market.

Even if an organization wishes to dramatically reduce its donor base’s average age through aggressive recruitment efforts, it’s difficult to achieve.

In the 1990s, I worked with one organization that had an average donor age in the low 70s. My firm instituted a successful donor-recruitment campaign that brought in more than 1 million new supporters. Our targeting wasn't based on age; we simply targeted every mailing list that could generate an acceptable response.

After such an aggressive effort, in which we pulled in every donor we could find, we lowered the donor base’s average age by only five or six years.

There are exceptions to any rule. Not all donor bases have such high average ages. AIDS organizations usually have a younger donor base. Women’s rights groups often have younger donors. Organizations that have major, short-term successes on the Internet — such as those that raked in a lot of money after Hurricane Katrina — also might demonstrate at least brief downward trends in their donor bases’ average ages.

None of these cases are due to targeted efforts based on age. So why waste breath on the issue?

What do you think?

It’s trending up, not down.
By Jim Hussey

I recently attended a parent's meeting at my church to discuss future activities for my teenage son’s youth group. Now stick with me — this actually addresses an important issue for all fundraisers.

The youth minister in charge of the group was outlining what would be happening and casually said, “The kids want the annual calendar and notices about events sent to them by (snail) mail. So please look out for any church envelopes addressed to your son or daughter, and please pass them on.”

I, the bored parent who was struggling to keep my eyes open, was instantly awakened by the direct marketer within that usually tries not to think about such matters on the weekend.

“Whoa!” I said to the group. “You mean these text message-crazy Internet addicts want to use old-fashioned mail? Why?”

“Because they fear the messages will be lost in the mass of information they receive,” he said. “And they want a hard copy of the schedule.”

“Wow!” I thought. I didn't think that kids today knew what “hard copy” means.

This tidbit of information had a profound effect on me. I had been hearing all of the predictions that the new technology of the Internet will replace the older technology of snail mail. But then I witnessed an example of the newest generation — which is incredibly Web-savvy and greatly dependent upon it for communication and information — actually backsliding into the use of the centuries-old medium of mail.

With so many cynics preaching about the end of direct mail, while advocating Internet-exclusive strategies, we need to take notice of what is actually happening out in the world around us.

If you look around, not just at my son’s youth group but also at what the major commercial marketers are doing, you quickly will learn that the two mediums of direct mail and the Internet actually complement one another. Instead of clashing in a life-or-death struggle, the Internet and direct mail are actually proving to be quite chummy bedfellows.

As a case in point, in recent years, one of the top mailers in the nation also is our nation’s largest Internet provider, America Online, which mails hundreds of millions of its disks annually.

USA TODAY recently quoted respected advertising forecaster Robert Coen’s estimate that marketers’ spending on direct mail will increase by 7.5 percent in 2007, after growing by 8.5 percent in 2006. This compares to a growth of only 4.8 percent for all forms of ad spending.

The United States Postal Service, while reporting decreases in First Class mail in fiscal year 2006, also estimated that the quantity of Standard mail (which is chiefly used for commercial and marketing purposes) increased by almost 3 percent. They also are predicting further growth for the 2007 and 2008 fiscal years … despite higher postage rates.

So what does this information tell fundraisers that use direct marketing? It tells us that the commercial world has rejected a “one or the other” attitude about the Internet and direct mail. It has learned through the past decade of experience that the best marketing strategies mix the two mediums.

And the same rule applies to fundraisers. Just as any fundraiser today is crazy to think about fundraising efforts without the use of the Internet, you'd be just as crazy to consider fundraising efforts without the use of direct mail.