Welcome back, in the last lesson you learned to provide donors clear disclosures and letters of understanding. In this lesson, we will cover marketing fundamentals that drive a successful planned giving effort. After this lesson, you will be able to: Create a plan to communicate planned gift ideas often and repeatedly, recall the range of communication tools you can use, craft a donor testimonial to convey ways gifts that helped the donor and the organization. Finally, articulate the positive impact a donor's gift will make. Let's get started. Every planned giving effort must reach prospects and persuade them to give to your charitable organization. This required marketing. Entire degree programs are devoted to marketing. In this lesson, we will only focus on a high level look at these elements of marketing specific to planned giving. You need more than marketing collateral pieces to develop a successful planned giving effort. You also need a marketing plan or strategy that has clear goals regarding what your core message will be, who you aim to reach with your message, that is your market or audience, and how best to deliver the message, that is your choice of media. One of the goals of a planned giving marketing effort is to encourage donors to consider a bequest or a gift in their will at every opportunity. That goal would help direct your marketing plan 80 percent to 90 percent of all estate gifts made to charities will be a bequest in the donors will or living trust. Bequests are the hallmark of every planned giving program. Therefore, the focus of your marketing should be on educating and encouraging donors to remember you in their will or trust. Good marketing requires clear communication, since bequest is a foundational term, let's define it clearly before we go further. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the simplest definition is, "The property or money that you promise in your will to give to another person or organization after you die." When you think about what you want to communicate, think in terms of key messages, one would be to encourage donors to consider a bequest in every opportunity. Another would be, to be able to articulate the positive impact or difference a donor's gift will make. Let me show you what those core messages might sound like, "Your legacy is our future, " or "There is only one way to make a gift that cost you nothing during your lifetime." A key part of any marketing campaign is that to know who you seek to reach. You will want to target the most loyal donors to your charity for bequests marketing. Loyalty matters more than the size of their gifts or their cumulative amount. When it comes to bequests loyalty trumps everything. After you know the what, here we will use encourage donors to consider a bequest or gift in their will at every opportunity and the who, a specific constituency. You would find various ways to effectively deliver your message often and repeatedly to your prospect, that's the how. Let's look at several kinds of collateral pieces commonly used in the planned giving efforts. These includes: a brochure, a postcard, and an ad. The brochure should have content to do four things: introduce the planned giving vehicle, educate the donor, entice the donor to want more information, and provide a way for the donor to contact you. The brochure can be used in mailings to donors or in one on one personal visits. Using a brochure is a great way to introduce the planned giving conversation. Brochures can be used by volunteers and staff. It's especially effective for those individuals who aren't yet comfortable having a conversation about planned giving. It's easy for a volunteer or staff to include a brochure in a packet of information for the donor to review. It's also easy for them to say that others they've met with have found the brochure helpful so they're sharing with the donor. A good postcard is visually appealing and a teaser that motivates donors to request additional information. These can include donor testimonials. Donor testimonials can motivate some donor to react because it puts a face in a story to the marketing piece. The donor may relate to the testimonial and think, "That person is similar to me, so I could do the same thing." The postcard is easy and convenient for the donor. They get something in the mail and return a request form to request the information. The information is sent to them for their reveal, a staff member follows up with a donor to answer any question and provide additional information. The post card is something you consistently send to the donors to remind them about the opportunity. Marketing for planned giving is not a blitz campaign but more of a repetitive drip. Most donors make changes to estate plans during life changing events. You can't predict the timing or know for sure when the donor will be receptive to hearing the message you're sending. So you need to continually send postcards. Planned giving ads are a great way to spread the word to a large audience at low cost. You can place your ad in existing publications that are sent out by your charity. This can be a magazine, newsletter, or annual report. The ad needs to be creative. The goal is to catch the reader's attention while they're flipping through the magazine. You want to convey the message quickly. The message should be in three parts: this is a planned giving ad, your gift makes an impact, and for more information, go to the planned giving website or contact the planned giving Team. In a planned giving marketing effort, it is part of your duties to develop information to educate select constituencies about the options available through planned gifts. You want to create content that will inform your donors and motivate them to react. The information should be communicated simply and clearly enough to be understood by the average person. It needs to highlight the benefits to the donor and highlight the impact on the charity. It should be inspirational. This is likely the only source of this information that the donor will see, so it's important for it to contain sufficient details without being too text heavy. Generally, the information should fit on one page. In addition to developing information to educate select constituencies about the options available through planned gifts, you also need to create a plan to disseminate that educational information. You could see this as part of your marketing campaign. This would include utilizing planned giving brochures, postcards, and ads. You would also include email as a channel to share this information. The most common and cost effective way to share information is through an e-newsletter. You can send this to a large audience and track the analytics to see who is opening the email and what content they find most interesting. This allows you to tailor your message based on the feedback from the analytics. Each year, as part of your business planning, you should map out the various channels you will use to disseminate the information. I generally, build a calendar for the upcoming 12-month period to outline when e-newsletters, postcards, and ads will be utilized. This allows you to see that you're sending out information in a systematic way and not bunching all the information in a concentrated span of time. You want the information going out evenly throughout the year. This was a sketch of the marketing skills and strategies needed in planned giving. I encourage you to look at examples of brochures, postcards, and ad to determine what would work for your charity. If you already have these in circulation, then look for opportunities to enhance what you have. If your charity doesn't disseminate information, then look to create these pieces. If you can't tackle all three, then start with the brochure, then work your way to the ad. Once you've decided on the information you share, then build a calendar to plan to disseminate the information. Make sure your plan includes which channels you'll use, such as email, mail, or social media. This will help you target your effort to maximize results. The marketing program will educate your most important audiences. It will also identify those donors who need the most immediate attention. It will help you focus your time and resources on the donors who will yield the best results and ultimately make you more productive. As a fundraiser, raising private gifts support is our primary function. Marketing can be very helpful in increasing your capacity as a fundraiser. Planned giving is the secret to showing a donor the way to make a gift much larger than they even thought possible. Marketing is a key component to helping them realize the possibilities. This will help any organization you serve, the donors, and those positively impacted by their generous gifts. Let's recap what we've covered. After this lesson you should now be able to: Create a plan to communicate planned gift ideas often and repeatedly, identify the who, what, and how of your marketing plan, recall the range of communication tools you can use, craft a donor testimonial to convey ways gifts have helped the donor and the organization, finally, articulate the positive impact a donor's gift will make. This concludes our final lesson in module four on planned giving administration. In the next module, we will turn our attention to resources to help you enhance your ability to be effective in the field of planned giving.
