Tapping Into The Planned Giving Potential That Exists In Your Donor Database

Similar trends in the past may provide us a likely donation pattern with suggested fundraising focus: 

• Annual donors will continue to give to their favorite charities but not increase the number of organizations receiving gifts.
  • Fundraising focus – convert your once-a-year donors to sustainer donors giving consistent gifts each month. Why?  Renewal rates for sustainers can easily reach 80-85%.

• Major donors may hesitate to make new commitments until the uncertain future levels out to some sort of ‘normal’.
  • Fundraising focus – relationship-building.  Why? Partnering for a common purpose may ease the uneasy and provide a sound investment channel where other financial assets may sit untouched while the market swings up or down or both.

• Planned gift donors never waiver!
  • Fundraising focus – market, survey and talk face-to-face about planned gifts.  Why? Planned gifts have a proven track record…. Once created they stay in place and the value of them grows over time.  It always a good time to talk to your constituents about making a planned gift.

To make the case for planned gift activity, you might want to calculate the revenue potential already existent in your constituent relationship database – also called your CRM.  Taking a formula first created by Michael Rosen in his book Donor-Centered Planned Gift Marketing and adding a few of my own calculations to it, I’ve attached a simple calculator for your use.  There’s also a calculator specific to gift annuities (another Michael Rosen creation that I’ve added to).   My additions help any organization to think about setting annual discovery goals that capture new gift closures as well as notifications of planned gifts already in place but not yet communicated to your organization.   

If you’re using Target Analytics’ predictive donor modeling scores already you can plug in your suggested score range prospect group.  If you’re not yet partnering with us to identify the best planned gift prospects in your database, you can insert your prospect pool number that you’ve calculated another way.  Either method you choose, use the calculator or both calculators to better understand why focusing on planned gift activity is important in our swinging economy.  The results you see will help you and your leaders understand why it’s always a good time to talk to your constituents about making a planned gift.