A few weeks ago, I listened to an excellent webinar by Anne Melvin, Planned Giving Director at Harvard, with some great insights into planned giving marketing and the trends they’re seeing at Harvard. I (as I am sure you do too) figure that as one of the most prestigious colleges in the country, they probably know a thing or two about planned giving!
Here are the highlights I took home:
- DIRECT MAIL STILL HAS THE BEST RESULTS FOR PG–Melvin looked at all of her gifts for the year and listed the top motivations for each gift–#1 is Direct Mail; #2 is Income; #3 Reunion (only pertains to schools); #4 Mission; #5 Timing; #6 One offs; #7 Repeat Offenders & #8 Shoe Leather
- DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS–Throughout your PG campaign, you need to vary your message/motivations for the various promo efforts because everybody has a different “button” to push!
- CREATIVE IS ONLY A SMALL PART OF THE SUCCESS–She talked about how although the creative is the fun part, it only accounts for 20% of the success of the promo—don’t get too caught up in it!
- AUDIENCE IS STILL KEY–She explained that about 40% of the success of your promo efforts rely on targeting the right audience. She looked at the PG scores for her donors and found that Blackbaud’s PG ratings missed 61% of them.
- PG DONOR AGE IS NOT YOUNGER–Despite studies indicating to lower the age for planned giving prospects, she analyzed her donors/gifts and the “sweet spot” is still age 60-89! Only 7% of her new donors were age 30-50.
- NEWSLETTERS ARE NOT DEAD–Just don’t overdo them.
- EMAIL PROMOS ARE NOT EFFECTIVE–But we still need to do them.
- PRINT ADS ARE NOT EFFECTIVE–And should be the first thing to cut.
- # OF PG DONORS ARE DOWN–She showed a bar chart displaying Harvard’s total PG donors #’s are down over the past 10 years.
- TYPICAL PG RESPONSE RATE IS 0.5%–She listed the response rates for 2 years worth of PG promos—most of her promos generated only 0.5% response with the BEST response being to her “BatchCalc” letter that was the pre-made illustrations.

