Ask most planned giving professionals how well their broad-based mailings went and they may say, "Pretty good ... we saw about 0.5 to 1% response rate." Before last November when I posted The “Silver Bullet” for Generating Planned Giving Leads, I would have agreed this was good because response rates in PG are much lower than the 2 to 10% you see in outright gift asks…
But now that we exceeded The Salvation Army Eastern Territory’s results of generating nearly 3% qualified planned giving leads for both World Vision and TSA Central Territory, with 4.5% and 3.15% respectively, I have moved from excited to ecstatic about the results we’ve been seeing from our Planned Giving survey mailings!
These mailings have blown the normal mailings out of the water, and there are a few key factors I originally posted that still prove crucial to the success of these mailings:
- 2-way communication with the donor – Their voice was heard, and the donors appreciated that.
- The right audience – We ran Gabriel Group's scoring model on the entire database and then only mailed to select people based on that scoring.
- Timing was right – We mailed during those hot summer months when people are indoors out of the heat. Also during summer, fewer organizations are mailing so there was less competition.
- Outer envelope made it clear this was not a request for a donation – just a request for their time. (But I can tell you, we still got a lot of donations too!)
Bottom line, these mailings drove in more PG leads than two or three other mailings combined, and the leads were qualified and genuinely interested in various planned giving vehicles.
In mailings like these, you also capture elusive data like if the donor is "heirless," which is a big key in wills. In addition, you unearth many folks who've already put you in their will so you can thank them.
The survey mailing in combination with targeted analytics is the best planned giving marketing tool I've seen in my 10+ years of fundraising, and it's so fulfilling to do this work for nonprofits like The Salvation Army and World Vision!
Author: Renee Durnin, CFRE
